The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

“Starting the first of March,” I said, “you’ll pay the same four hundred dollars. To me. Every month, for as long as you live here.”

The kitchen got so quiet I could hear the refrigerator.

“Six years,” Marjorie said finally. Her voice was thin. “Six years I have lived in this house, and now you want rent.”

“My mother paid it for four weeks,” I said. “On a couch, with a new hip, out of her Social Security. You can pay it in a real bedroom.”

“That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

She opened her mouth, and closed it, and then she picked up her coffee cup and went up the stairs to her room and shut the door. She did not slam it. Marjorie has never slammed a door in her life. She shut it the way you shut a door on a stranger.

She did not come out for lunch. She came out once in the afternoon for the bathroom and once to fill her water glass, and she did not look at me either time. She ate supper in her room on a TV tray that night, and the next night too.

I will be honest. Those days were awful.

My mother felt terrible. She kept saying she should go home to Grayling, that she was causing trouble, that she would be fine on her own now. She could not drive yet, and she could not get in her own bathtub, and she knew it, and I knew it, and still she kept saying it.

“Erin, she’s Jon’s mother,” Mom said on Sunday afternoon. We were sitting in the upstairs bedroom, Mom propped on the pillows, me on the edge of the bed. “You have to live with her after I’m gone.”

“I know that.”

“Then let it go. It was four hundred dollars. Twice. I’m not destitute.”

“It’s not about the money, Mom.”

“Then what’s it about?”

I thought about it for a long time. “It’s about her taking it out of your hand,” I said. “In my living room. While I was at work. And telling you not to tell me. If she’d asked me for money, I might have given it to her. But she went around me, to you, because you were the one who couldn’t say no.”

My mother did not argue with that. She just looked out the window at the snow on the spruce trees behind the house and said, “She’s lonely, honey. You know that, don’t you? She is so lonely in this house.”

I did not want to hear it right then. But I heard it.

On Monday I went to work and sat at my desk and did not do much work. My friend Pam from the next cubicle asked if I was coming down with something. I said no, just a long weekend. I did not tell her any of it.

Jon called Wednesday night from a Pilot outside Toledo. He was on his way north, a day early, and he was in a good mood, talking about a load of auto parts he had picked up and the roads clearing up south of Bay City.

“How’s your mom doing?” he asked. “And mine? They getting along all right?”

I stood in the kitchen with the phone and looked up the stairs toward Marjorie’s closed door.

“We’ll talk when you get home,” I said. “At the table. All of us.”