The Money Orders That Kept Mom Home

“Jolene, there’s a paper on my door,” Mom said, and I could hear in her voice that she had already read the worst word on it.

It was 6:40 in the morning on the first of October. I was standing in the school kitchen with flour to my elbows, sliding the second sheet pan of biscuits into the oven.

“What kind of paper, Mom?”

“Hang on. I have to get right up on it where the light is.” I heard the front door, then her slippers on the porch boards, then the tape crackling as she leaned in close.

Mom has macular degeneration. She can still see the edges of things, a face, a car going by, but print has to be big and close and in good light, or it swims.

“It says five day notice,” she read slowly. “To pay or quit. Past due, two thousand one hundred dollars. June, July, August, September.” She stopped. “Jolene, that can’t be right.”

I set the oven mitt down on the steel counter. Behind me the dish machine was running and somebody was dropping a crate of milk cartons by the cooler.

“Read me the top again,” I said.

She read it again. The name of the company that owns the park, out of Oklahoma City. Her lot number. Her name, Dolores Fitch, spelled right. Two thousand one hundred dollars.

Four months at $525 is $2,100. I did that math standing there in my hairnet, and my stomach dropped all the way to the tile floor.

“Mom,” I said, “who has been taking your rent to the office?”

She was quiet a second, and I already knew. “Clint has. Every month since his daddy passed. You know that.”

I did know that. I had thanked him for it at Easter, standing in Mom’s little kitchen with a plate of deviled eggs. I had thanked him.

The man who drove past the office

Clint Fitch is my stepbrother. He is 50, three years older than me, and his father married my mother when I was twenty-five and already out of the house.

My own dad died when I was fifteen. Mom raised me alone in a rented house in Guthrie on what she made at the switchboard, and then the phone company changed over and she worked the front desk at the clinic.

Clint’s dad, Mom’s second husband, was a decent, quiet man who fixed lawn mowers in his shed and called her Dee. When he died two years ago, he left her the single-wide, a little life insurance, and his son.

The trailer is tan with a small wooden porch he built himself. It sits on a rented lot in a park off the county road east of town, eleven lots on one gravel lane, mostly older folks and a couple of young families.

Mom gave up her driver’s license the spring after the funeral, when her eyes got bad enough that she nearly took out a mailbox. She cried about it, then she squared her shoulders and said that was that.

That’s when Clint stepped up. He drove right past the park office every morning on his way to the tire shop where he works, and he said, Dolores, you just hand me the rent on the first and I’ll drop it off.

It made sense. I’m twenty minutes the other way, and I’m at the school by five thirty most mornings. I went over on Sundays and took her to the store and the pharmacy, and Clint took care of the rent.

For a year and a half, as far as anybody knew, it worked fine.

“Mom,” I said, “did you call him?”

“I called him first,” she said, and her voice went small. “Before you. He said there must be some kind of mix-up and he’d come by after work. He said he’d help me figure out where I’m going to go.”

Where she was going to go. I put my hand flat on the steel counter so I wouldn’t knock something over.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Don’t you touch a single thing. I’m coming.”