The Porch by the Bus Stop

Nick waited until the kids were in bed. That was the first thing I noticed, sitting across from him at the kitchen table on a Sunday night in late June.

He had never once in three years waited until the kids were in bed to talk to me.

“Roxanne,” he said, “I think it’s time you got your own place.”

I had been folding a basket of the kids’ clothes. I remember I was holding one of Owen’s little gray socks, the kind with the rubber dots on the bottom so he would not slide on the hallway floor.

I set it down on the pile very carefully, as if it might break.

“All right,” I said. I did not know what else to say. I had known something was coming since the wedding.

A new wife does not want her husband’s dead wife’s mother sleeping down the hall. I understood that. I had even started looking at the paper.

Then I asked the one thing I had promised myself I would never ask.

I asked it quietly, because the kids were asleep and because I have never been a woman who raises her voice. “Nick, what about the money from my house?”

He did not look up. “That was rent,” he said.

“You lived here almost three years, Rox. Food, utilities, a roof. That’s what it was for. I think that’s fair.”

Rent. I sat there and let the word settle on me. I had given that man fifty-two thousand dollars in one cashier’s check, and four hundred dollars a month on top of it, and every grocery bill since the funeral. And he had just called it rent.

I did not argue. I did not cry until the house was quiet. When I did, I put my face in Kelsey’s old quilt so nobody would hear me, the same way I had heard Nick through the garage door so many nights, crying where he thought we were all asleep.

Before

My name is Roxanne Biel. I am sixty years old, and for twenty-six years I carried the mail on a rural route out of the post office in Clinton, Illinois.

That is DeWitt County, flat as a tabletop and planted fence to fence in corn and beans.

My husband, Dale, passed when Kelsey was sixteen. A heart attack in the machine shed, on a Saturday, with the radio playing the Cardinals game.

After that it was just the two of us in the little white house on the blacktop east of town.

Kelsey was my only child. She was a pharmacy tech at the drugstore downtown, and she was good at it, because she was patient with old people and could explain a prescription label to a man who would not wear his glasses. Half of Clinton knew her by her laugh.

She married Nick Varner when she was twenty-four. He was an apprentice electrician then, working with a union outfit out of Decatur, a quiet boy with big hands who called me ma’am for a full year before I made him stop. I liked him from the start.

They had Lily, then Owen, then Gracie, two years apart like stair steps.

They bought a brick ranch house on the north side of town with a fenced yard and a swing set Nick put together himself on a Fourth of July weekend. They were happy. I want that said plainly.

Three years ago this past spring, Kelsey woke up with a headache she said was the worst of her life.

Nick drove her to the hospital in Clinton, and they flew her to Springfield, and by the next evening she was gone. A brain aneurysm. She was thirty-one years old.

I will not write much about that week. I do not think I can.

I will only say that I remember standing in the funeral home in my good navy dress, holding Gracie, who was two, while she patted my face and asked when Mama was coming to get her.