The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

There was a long silence on the line. Jon is not a talker, but he is not a fool either, and nineteen years of marriage teaches you what a silence means.

“Is everybody all right?” he said. “Is anybody hurt?”

“Nobody’s hurt. Your mother’s fine. My mother’s fine. It’s a family thing, and it’s not a phone thing.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Okay. Friday night. Late.”

I almost told him then. I want that on the record. It would have been easy. But I had thought it through, and I had decided that if anybody told Jon first, it ought to be his mother. She had the right to tell her own son in her own words. I was not going to ambush her.

So I went up the stairs and knocked on Marjorie’s door.

She opened it partway. The television was on low. She had her reading glasses on and a crossword book in her hand with the pencil stuck in the spiral.

“Jon’s coming home Friday night,” I said. “I haven’t told him anything. I thought you should be the one.”

She looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. “Why?”

“Because he’s your son,” I said. “And it’s your story to tell first. I’ll tell him mine after.”

Something moved in her face then. I could not have told you what it was. She said, “All right,” and she shut the door, but not the way she had shut it on Saturday.

Thursday Mom did her stairs four times by herself, with me only standing at the bottom watching, and she was so proud of herself that she called my sister to tell her. That night she came down for supper on her own two feet and her walker and sat at the table.

Marjorie came out of her room and sat at the table too. It was the first time in five days. She did not say anything, and nobody asked her to. We ate pork chops and applesauce, and the only sound was the forks and the furnace kicking on.

Halfway through supper, Mom reached over and passed Marjorie the salt without being asked. Marjorie said, “Thank you, Elaine.” That was all. But I noticed it.

Friday it snowed all afternoon, the heavy wet lake-effect kind that comes in off Lake Michigan and dumps on us in a band. I came home from work at five and shoveled the end of the driveway so Jon could get his pickup in from the terminal lot.

Marjorie stood at the front window most of the evening. She had on her coat by eight o’clock, sitting on the chair by the door with her purse in her lap like she was waiting for a ride to church.

Mom and I sat at the kitchen table playing gin rummy on the oilcloth, and neither of us said anything about the woman in the coat by the door.

A little after nine, the headlights swung up the driveway. Marjorie was out the door before Jon cut the engine.

I stood at the kitchen sink and looked out the window into the garage through the little window in the side door. I could see them standing beside his pickup under the bare bulb. Marjorie was talking. She talked a long time, with her hands moving. Jon stood there with his duffel bag still over his shoulder and did not move at all.

I could not hear the words. I could only see his face, and he was not looking at her. He was looking at the floor.