A Grandmother With Her Own Door

My son-in-law slid a sheet of notebook paper across the kitchen table, and there was one number on it, circled twice.

$800.

“That’s rent, utilities, and your share of the groceries,” my daughter said. She had her hands wrapped around a coffee mug that had gone cold a while ago. “And then four days a week with the kids. So you’d be earning your keep, Mom. It wouldn’t be charity.”

Earning my keep.

It was a Saturday, a little after lunch, the first week of October. The kitchen window was open a crack, and you could hear the dryer fans running down at the elevator the way you can hear them all over Holdrege in harvest, a low steady roar like a river that never gets anywhere.

I looked at the paper. It was torn out of a spiral notebook, with the little ragged edge still on it. Todd’s handwriting. He makes his eights like two circles stacked up, the way they teach you in second grade.

“Eight hundred,” I said.

“A one-bedroom at the apartments out by the highway is seven seventy-five,” Todd said. He said it to the salt shaker. “We looked it up. So it’s fair. It’s right at fair.”

“And you’d have family,” Michelle said. “You wouldn’t be by yourself out there anymore.”

I am sixty-seven years old. My Social Security check, the one I draw now as Dale’s widow, is $1,640 a month. I kept books at the lumber yard for twenty-two years, so I did not need a pencil. Eight hundred from sixteen forty left me eight hundred and forty dollars for my car insurance, my Medicare supplement, my gas, my pills, my tithe, and a Christmas for two grandchildren.

And for that I would be the hired girl in my own daughter’s house, four days out of seven.

I want to be fair to her, because I’ve had time to be. She did not say it mean. That was almost the worst part. She said it the way you’d read somebody the terms on a used car, pleasant and a little rushed, like she’d practiced it in the bathroom mirror and wanted to get through it before she lost her nerve.

“Can I see it again?” I asked. “The basement.”

“Sure, Mom. Of course.”

We went down. Todd stayed at the table.

They had done what they could with it, I’ll say that. There was a remnant of tan carpet laid over the concrete, and a double bed with a frame, and a lamp from Michelle’s old bedroom at home. There was a dehumidifier running in the corner with a hose that went to the floor drain. The one window was up by the ceiling, the size of a cake pan, and what you could see out of it was the bottom of the neighbor’s fence.

It smelled like wet cardboard and laundry soap.

“Todd’s going to put up a wall here,” Michelle said, pointing. “So you’d have your own room. Your own space. And the bathroom’s just up the stairs.”

“Up the stairs,” I said.

“It’s only thirteen steps.”

I counted them myself going back up. She was right. Thirteen.

Sadie had followed us down. She is four, and she had on one sock and a princess nightgown at one o’clock in the afternoon. She stood on the bottom step with her thumb near her mouth, not quite in it, because she is trying to quit.

“Grandma,” she said, “are you going to live in the under?”

“We’ll see, sweet pea.”

“There’s a spider in the under. Eli named him Kevin.”