The Back Door
The back door of my mother’s house opens onto a little patch of dirt yard and then a gravel alley. There is no walk.
There is no rail. In the summer the dirt is hard, and in the winter it turns to slick red mud that holds a shoe like glue.
The mailbox is at the front of the house, by the road. The church is at the front of the house, three blocks down.
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The neighbors are at the front of the house. Everything my mother loved about that little place was out the front door.
For a while, she tried it. With the cast on her arm, she would go out the back, along the side of the house where the old flower bed used to be, and around to the front.
But in April she slipped in the mud by the downspout and caught herself on the siding, and after that she stopped going out at all unless I was holding her elbow.
I asked Danby again in May, in person, with my hat in my hands so to speak. I said I understood money was tight.
I said maybe we could split the cost. He said he would think about it, and when I came back two weeks later he said he had thought about it, and the answer was the same.
I should say plainly what I knew about Hollis Danby, because it matters. His wife had been sick for six years before she passed.
It was the kind of sickness that takes everything a long time before it takes the person. He had sold their lake lot, then his good truck, then most of what they had put away, and at the end he was driving her to Lexington twice a month for treatments the insurance would not pay for.
When she died, the only things he had left were his own house and four little rentals on our street, all of them bought back when houses in Paintsville cost what a new car costs now.
I think somewhere in those six years he started looking at every renter as a bill coming due. I think he told himself that if he could just keep the money in, he would never be that scared again.
That was his reason. I understood it. It did not mend my mother’s wrist, and it did not make the back door any less muddy.