The Rent My Sister Kept

I was standing right there with the coffee pot in my hand. I watched my mother’s face go from puzzled to something much quieter.

“How long have they been there, Dolores?” Mom asked.

“Why, since last November. Marsha comes by the first of every month. Around one o’clock, regular as the mail. She stands on the porch a couple of minutes and goes off with an envelope.”

Mom thanked her. She finished her green beans. She let me help her into her coat and into the truck, and she was quiet until we were halfway to Wartrace.

“Lori,” she said, looking out at the soybean stubble. “Marsha told me that house was sitting empty.”

“I know, Mom.”

“She told me it was costing me money to heat the pipes.”

“I know.”

“Did she tell you something different?”

“No, ma’am. She told me the same thing.”

Mom nodded slowly. “Then I would like to go and see for myself.”

I wanted to call Marsha that night. I want that understood.

I had my phone in my hand and my thumb over her name. But Mom put her fingers on my wrist and shook her head, and the reasons she gave were the right ones.

If I called, Marsha would have a story ready for Mom before I hung up and a different one ready for the family in the house. Marsha has always talked faster than I think.

And a young family with a baby had been paying rent to someone who had no right to take it. If Marsha got to them first, they would be frightened, or lied to again, or both.

“I want to see it with my own eyes first,” Mom said. “And then I want to hear it from the people living there. Not from her.”

So we waited a day, and on Friday, after Ruby finished Mom’s hair, I drove her down Poplar Street, and there was the woman with the clothesline and the text on my phone.

Mom looked at the swing a long time. She did not cry. My mother does not cry in public and she did not cry in my truck.

“Take me home, Lori,” she said at last. “I need to look at my checkbook.”

Mom keeps her checkbook the way she has kept it since 1971, in a green vinyl cover with a rubber band, every check entered in pencil, every balance carried forward by hand.

She sat at my kitchen table that evening with her reading glasses on and I sat across from her. Lester stood at the counter pretending to wash a coffee cup that was already clean.

“February,” Mom said, and turned the register toward me. “Property tax. County and city together. One thousand, one hundred eighty-six dollars.”

“You paid that out of your Social Security?”

“Marsha said the house was empty and still had to be paid for. She said I would not want to lose it. So I wrote the check and she carried it to the trustee’s office for me.”

My mother’s Social Security is sixteen hundred and forty dollars a month. It was one hundred and forty dollars more than that when Dad was still alive, and then it was not.

She turned another page. “And the insurance. One thousand, two hundred eighty-four. The man said an empty house costs more to cover, and Marsha said that was just how it was.”