The Lease for the Room Over the Garage

Brooke came up the garage stairs on a Saturday afternoon in April with three typed pages in her hand and my son two steps behind her.

I was folding the twins’ laundry on my bed. Emma’s little purple socks, Owen’s dinosaur pajamas. The window over the driveway was open a crack, and I could smell somebody’s first mowing of the year down the block.

“Deb, do you have a minute?” Brooke said.

She never called me Mom. I never asked her to. Some girls don’t, and that’s all right.

“Sure, honey,” I said. “Kids down?”

“Both asleep. Finally.”

She held the pages out. They were stapled in the corner, neat as a bank statement. At the top, in bold letters, it said Room Rental Agreement.

I took them. I stood up and went to the window, where the light was better, because my reading glasses were somewhere under a pile of towels.

The first page said the room over the garage at 2117 Prairie Rose Lane would be rented to Deborah A. Kaltenbach for $700 a month, due on the first, starting May 1. A late fee of $35 after the fifth.

The second page was the part that took my breath.

Kitchen use, weekdays, 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. and after 7:30 p.m. Weekends by arrangement. Laundry room on Tuesdays. Overnight guests by arrangement. Tenant to keep personal food items in the mini refrigerator provided in the rented room.

The mini refrigerator provided. I had bought that mini refrigerator myself, at the Menards in Sioux Falls, for $139, the week I moved in.

The third page was a line for my signature, a line for Brooke’s, and a line for Jake’s.

I looked up at my son.

Jake was standing just inside the door with his hands in the pockets of his work jeans. He was twenty-nine years old, six foot one, with his father’s wide shoulders and his father’s habit of rubbing the back of his neck when something was wrong.

He was rubbing it now. And he was looking at the floor.

How I came to live over a garage

I should tell you how I got there, because people hear “lives in a room over her son’s garage” and they picture something sad. It wasn’t sad. It was the plan, and it was a good plan, and we made it together at my own kitchen table.

My husband Gary died six years ago. He was fifty-two. He went out to the shop one February morning to warm up the truck and didn’t come back in, and that is all I will say about that.

After that it was just me in our little ranch house in Canton. Three bedrooms, one bath, a basement that took water every spring, and a clothesline Gary put up the year we bought it. I worked billing at the hospital in Sioux Falls, forty minutes each way, and I came home every night to a house that was too quiet.

Then Jake married Brooke, and then the twins came, Emma and Owen, born on a Tuesday in a snowstorm. I drove up I-29 in the dark at twenty miles an hour to be there.

They were renting a townhouse on the south side of Sioux Falls. Two bedrooms, the twins in one, Jake and Brooke in the other, a stroller in the hallway you had to turn sideways to get past.