The Insulin Box Grandma Drove to School

He didn’t look at me. He turned in his chair, all the way around, and looked at his wife.

“You should have called me,” he said. “The first month. The first time you didn’t fill it. You should have called me on the rig.”

“You would have quit,” she said. Her eyes filled up. “You would have quit and come home, and then we’d have had no money at all.”

“Yes,” Jared said. “I would have quit and come home.”

She just looked at him.

“That’s my son,” he said. His voice was steady and low, the way his father’s used to get. “I’d quit any job in North Dakota before I’d let him skip one shot. You don’t get to decide by yourself that a paycheck matters more than that. And you don’t carry rent by yourself either. You’re my wife. That’s not how we work.”

Krista put her face in her hands.

Jared reached over and took one of her hands down off her face and held it on the table. He didn’t let go of it the rest of the afternoon.

“I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I was, Tuesday night. I’m not now. I’m mad that you were scared to tell me. That one’s on me too. I’ve been gone so much you thought you had to be both of us.”

Then he turned to me. “Mom,” he said. “How much?”

“Jared.”

“How much went to rent instead of to him?”

I didn’t want to say it. Krista said it for me, reading off her sheet. “Twelve hundred. Six of the checks. And a hundred to the truck.”

“Thirteen hundred,” Jared said, and nodded, like a man reading the weight off a scale. “Okay.”

He pulled the pad of paper across the table, the one I’d added it up on Tuesday. He saw my two numbers there, twenty-four hundred and eleven days, and he looked at them for a long minute without saying anything. Then he turned to a clean page.

“Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “And you both tell me if it’s wrong.”

He wrote it out as he talked, the way his father used to plan a fence line. The back rent was nineteen hundred dollars. He would pay one month out of his check the next Friday and call the landlord himself. I offered the other month from my savings. He let me, wrote it down as a loan, and put “$100 a month, Mom” next to it.

“I don’t need it back,” I said.

“I know you don’t,” he said. “I need to give it back.”

So I let him write it.

The pharmacy would stay in my name, the way I’d set it up. I would pay at the counter until the deductible was met, and then the three of us would sit at this table again and look at what was left. Jared wrote that down, too. Krista didn’t argue. She just nodded.

“And one more thing,” Jared said. He looked at Krista. “The folder comes out at this table. Once a month. On my week home. All three of us. No more doing it alone.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do,” she said. “Okay.”

Downstairs, somebody scored. We heard Mason yell and stomp on the floor, and all three of us looked up at the ceiling at the same time, and then, I don’t know why, all three of us laughed. It was not much of a laugh. But it was the first one.