The Rent My Sister Kept

“I can add,” Mom said. “In the same twelve months I paid the county and city taxes on this house, one thousand, one hundred eighty-six dollars, and the insurance, one thousand, two hundred eighty-four, out of a Social Security check of sixteen hundred and forty. Because you told me the house was empty.”

“And every Friday morning,” Mom said, “you told me it was empty. You looked me in my face.”

I thought Marsha might run. For a moment I was sorry for her, and then I remembered Theo pushing the walker down the kitchen and the motel the Millers had lived in for two months, and the sorrow turned around and went the other way.

“Why?” Mom said. “I would like to hear it from you. Not an excuse. A reason.”

Marsha’s voice, when it came, was a ragged little thing.

“Duane lost his job. Last October. The parts plant in Murfreesboro closed the second shift and he was on it. He was out seven months, Mama. We got four months behind on the house. I couldn’t, I couldn’t tell you. You’d already helped with the dryer and the truck tires and Brianna’s braces. I couldn’t be the one who came to you again.”

“So you took it from me instead.”

“I was going to pay it back. I swear I was going to. I took one month to catch up on the mortgage, only the one, and then Duane’s hours came back slow and I couldn’t stop. It got easier every month. That’s the awful part. It got easier.”

“And Duane?”

“He thinks I’ve been cleaning houses on Saturdays.” She was crying now, openly, the ugly kind. “He doesn’t know. Nobody knows.”

“Dolores knows,” Mom said dryly. “The whole street knows.”

A tiny, shocked laugh went around the Hendersons’ yard, and was hushed.

“Ashamed to ask your mother for help,” Mom said, and she did not smile. “Then be ashamed of this instead.”

“I want you to do three things,” Mom said. “Right now. On this porch. I want you to look at that young man and that young woman and apologize to them. By their names.”

Marsha lowered her hands. She turned.

Shawn was standing in the doorway with Theo on his hip. Jolene was beside him with the baby. Neither one said anything. They were young, and they did not know what a person was supposed to do when the one who had lied to them cried on their front porch.

“Shawn,” Marsha said. “Jolene. I am so sorry. I took what was not mine and I used your family to do it. I told you things about my mother that were not true. You did everything right and I did everything wrong.”

Jolene looked at her for a long moment. “Theo asked me once why the lady on the porch never came inside,” she said at last. “I told him she was busy.”

Marsha flinched.

“I hope you can be less busy now,” Jolene said, and it was gentle, and it hit like a hammer.

“Second thing,” Mom said. “The key.”

Marsha opened her purse. Her hands shook so hard she dropped it twice, once into the purse and once onto the boards. Finally she held out a key on a ring, and Mom took it and put it in her pocketbook without looking at it.