The Rent My Sister Kept

“I am not angry about the money,” she said.

Lester put the cup down. I think he was about to say something he would regret, and I gave him a look, and he picked the cup back up.

“I would have given her the money, Lori,” Mom said. “All of it. If she had come to my kitchen and said Mama, we are in trouble. I would have written the check before she finished the sentence.”

“What I cannot stand,” she said, “is that she looked me in the face every Friday and told me the house was empty.”

I went around the table and put my arms around her. Her hair still held Ruby’s hairspray, and her collar the lavender soap she has bought since before I was born.

Marsha used to take her to Ruby’s every Friday morning at nine, I remembered. Before the fall. It was their thing. After the hip, Marsha said her work hours got shifted, and I took Mom instead.

I had thought nothing of it. That is the part that stings.

Lester wanted to drive to Marsha’s that night. I asked him to wait, and for a man who is slow to anger and slower to let it go, it was a great deal to ask. “I’ll stay in the truck,” he said finally. “But I’m bringing my tools. That step on your mother’s porch was loose in 1998.”

At supper on Saturday she said, “Tomorrow is the first. Marsha comes at one o’clock. Dolores said so. I think we should be there before she is.”

Sunday morning she wore her good navy cardigan with the pearl buttons, her gray wool slacks, and her tan winter coat. She would not take her cane. She wanted the walker, because the walker, she said, had four wheels and an opinion.

She had me put her pocketbook on her lap. Inside it, I would learn later, was the legal pad, folded in thirds, and a pen.

Lester followed in his own truck, a quarter mile back, and when I parked at the curb on Poplar Street, he parked behind me and cut his engine and stayed where he was, his toolbox on the seat beside him.

Across the street Dolores Mabry’s husband, a bearded man in a red flannel shirt, stood on the lawn with a rake, and Dolores stood on the porch behind him. I do not believe either of them was raking anything.

The Hendersons next door were out in the yard bagging leaves. The mailman had stopped his truck. It was one of those moments when a whole street seems to be holding its breath.

I got the walker out of the back and set the wheels on the pavement. Mom swung her feet down. I held her elbow.

“I can do it,” she said, and I let go.

The third step wobbled under the walker, just as Lester said it would.

“Dad always meant to fix that,” Mom said, and I got her hand onto the rail and the walker up beside her.

At the top she stood a moment to catch her breath. She put her hand on the chain of the porch swing, and the swing moved a little under her fingers.

“Walter hung this the summer Marsha was born,” she said. “Nineteen seventy-seven. He hung it so I could rock her at night without waking the rest of you.”