The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

Marjorie took a long time. She took off her coat at last and folded it over her lap.

“Because I’ve been a guest in this house for six years,” she said. “A guest, Jon. Do you know what that’s like? I don’t pay for the heat. I don’t pay for the groceries. I don’t fix anything, I don’t decide anything.

“Erin runs this house. You send the money. I just live in the yellow room at the end of the hall like a, like a charity case.”

“Mom, nobody ever said that.”

“Nobody had to say it.” She looked at me then, and her chin was shaking.

“And then Elaine came, and she was the one who needed things. And for once I was the one who knew where the coffee filters were. I knew what the heating bill was in January. I knew how the house ran. And when I told her what she owed, and she paid it, I felt like…”

She stopped.

“Like what?” Jon said gently.

“Like the woman of the house,” Marjorie said, and then she put her face in her hands.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

I want to tell you that I felt nothing but righteous then, but that is not what I felt. I looked at my mother-in-law, seventy-four years old, with her perm and her red sweater and her hands over her face, and I thought about six years of her standing in my kitchen, rearranging my cupboards.

Six years of her trying to have a place in a house where nothing was hers.

I had put those cupboards back without a word. Twice. I had thought I was being gracious. Maybe I had only been telling her, without saying it, that nothing here was hers to touch.

“What did you do with it?” I asked her quietly. “The money.”

Marjorie lowered her hands and wiped her eyes with her thumbs. “Groceries,” she said. “I bought the groceries the week you worked that double. And I paid the propane man when he came on the twentieth, so you wouldn’t have to. The rest is in an envelope in my dresser. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

I had not even noticed the propane bill was paid. I had assumed Jon did it from the road.

My mother was the one who spoke next. She reached across the table, over the forty twenties Jon had laid out, and put her hand on Marjorie’s arm.

“Marjorie,” she said. “You could have just asked me for help with the groceries. I would have gone with you. We could have gone together.”

Marjorie looked at her hand on her arm like she did not know what it was.

“I didn’t think you’d want to,” she said.

“Well, I’m asking now,” Mom said.

Jon cleared his throat. He is not good at speeches and he did not make one. He said, “Mom, you were never a guest here. But if you want to pay something, you tell me, and I’ll let you. You don’t go around Erin, and you never take anything from Elaine. All right?”

“All right,” Marjorie whispered.

“And Erin said four hundred,” Jon said. He looked at me. “That still stand?”

I thought about it. I had said it out of anger, partly. I had said it so she would know what it felt like. But looking at her then, I understood something I had not understood on that Saturday morning. She did not want to live in our house for free. She never had. That was the whole sorry mess.