The Rent My Sister Kept

“I believe you, Duane.”

“I thought she was cleaning houses. She’d come home so tired.” He looked at Marsha, and it was not an angry look. It was the look of a man who has found out how hard his wife carried something alone. “I should have asked where it came from.”

“That’s a hard thing to admit,” Mom said.

“It’s the truth.” He reached into his jacket and laid a fold of bills on my table. “That’s six hundred dollars. I did a driveway slab Saturday for a man in Wartrace. It’s mine, Dina. It’s not hers and it’s not anyone’s but mine, and I want it to be the first thing in the ledger.”

Mom looked at the money. She looked at Duane. Then she looked at me.

“Lori,” she said. “You keep books. Get the ledger.”

I had brought one home from the feed store, a green columnar pad, the kind I use every day. I set it in front of Marsha with a pencil.

My sister wrote at the top, in her small neat hand, “Owed to Nadine Dunn: $13,200.” Under it she wrote the date, and under that, “Paid $600,” and she did the subtraction slowly, as if it hurt to do.

“Twelve thousand, six hundred,” she said.

“What can you pay?” Mom asked.

“Whatever you say.”

“I am asking what you can pay. Not what you can promise.”

Marsha looked at Duane. Duane looked at the table.

“Six hundred a month,” Marsha said. “If Duane’s hours stay. And if they don’t, I’ll find another job on the weekends.”

“Six hundred a month for twenty-one more months, and it is done,” Mom said. She had done the sum already. “August of 2028. I will write the dates down myself.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“And one more thing.” Mom took off her glasses. “Friday mornings. Ruby’s shop at nine. You used to take me, Marsha. I would like you to take me again.”

My sister put down the pencil. She pressed her lips together hard.

“I’ll be here at eight-forty,” she said. “Every Friday.”

“Eight-thirty,” said Mom. “I like to be early.”

Friday morning, the sixth of November, I stood at my kitchen window with my coffee in my hand and watched my sister’s gray Kia turn into our driveway at eight twenty-eight.

She got out and went around to the trunk and took out Mom’s walker and unfolded it. She stood waiting with her hands on the grips like a woman at a train station.

Mom came out the back door on Lester’s ramp in her tan coat with her pocketbook over her arm. Her hair was a little flat from sleeping, and she said Ruby would fix that.

Marsha tried to take her arm at the bottom. Mom looked at the hand for a second, and then she let her.

They went down the gravel drive together, my mother and my sister, slow, one rolling step and one careful one, and they did not talk. At the car Marsha opened the door and bent to help my mother in, and my mother laid her dry palm against Marsha’s cheek and left it there.

The Kia pulled out onto the county road and was gone.

On the kitchen table behind me lay the green ledger, open to the first page. Under my sister’s careful handwriting there was one word in my mother’s pencil, small and upright and sure. Received.