My Daughter Wanted 800 a Month and Four Days of Babysitting for Her Basement So I Rented My Own Little…
“You take until November, Judy. You take longer if you need it.”
“I won’t need longer,” I told him. “That house was always yours, Jim. You’ve been good to me past what anybody could ask.”
So that was that. Nobody was the villain in it. A young family needed a house. And I was a widow living alone in five rooms that belonged to somebody else.
That’s how I came to be sitting in my car in front of my daughter’s split-level, with a piece of notebook paper in my purse that said my keep was worth eight hundred dollars a month.
I started the car. I was going to drive home. I had every intention of it.
White siding. A green shingle roof. A front porch just deep enough for a swing. And the swing was there, hung on chains, with a seat somebody had painted not too long ago.
One step up from the walk.
One.
“Mother couldn’t do stairs,” Mr. Brandt said, seeing me look at it.
He let me in.
The front room was the kitchen too. A sink under a good, big window. A gas stove with four burners. A refrigerator that hummed. Room for a table by the wall. A place for a couch. A heating stove in the corner.
Through a door there was the bedroom, with a closet. Off that, a bathroom with a tub that had a grab bar bolted into the studs.
That was the house. That was all of it. You could stand in the middle of the front room and see every corner you owned.
The window over the sink looked straight out at the elevator and the scale and the trucks.
“It’s loud in harvest,” he said. “The fans run all night. And the train comes through about two in the morning and again around five. Mother said she quit hearing it after a month.”
“I’ve been listening to a quiet house for two years, Mr. Brandt. I believe I could stand some noise.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s corn dust on everything from now till Thanksgiving. I won’t lie to you about that.”
“What are you asking?”
“Five fifty. You pay your own lights and gas. I keep up the roof and the furnace, and I mow it when I mow the store.”
Five fifty from sixteen forty left me a thousand and ninety. I did that one without a pencil too.
“It isn’t much,” he said again.
“It’s got a door,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
He blinked at me.
“You want to think it over? Talk to Michelle?”
“I’ve been thinking it over for three weeks. Every time I bought bird seed.”
I wrote the check right there on the hood of my Buick. I didn’t want to walk back to the store and give myself time to turn sensible.
He tried to wave off a deposit. He said he didn’t need a deposit from Dale’s wife. I wrote it for the first month anyway and told him he could take the deposit out in trust.
He worked two keys off his big ring and put them on a little ring of their own.
“Front and back,” he said.
I held them in my palm. Two brass keys, still warm from his pocket.
I went from my father’s house to the hired man’s house at nineteen years old. I have been somebody’s daughter under his roof, and somebody’s wife under her husband’s employer’s roof. And I was grateful for both. I truly was.
But I was sixty-seven years old before anybody ever handed me the keys to a place I had picked out by myself.
I’m not ashamed to say I had to look away at the elevator for a minute, so Mr. Brandt wouldn’t see my face.
Here’s the part I’m not proud of.
I didn’t tell Michelle.
Not that day. Not that week. She called on Monday to ask if I’d thought about it, and I said I was still thinking. Which was a lie of the kind that isn’t quite a lie. I was thinking. I was thinking about where to put the couch.
Jim Olson and his boy moved me on a Wednesday. They backed a flatbed up to the farmhouse porch and wouldn’t let me carry anything heavier than a lamp.
I took my bed. The couch. The kitchen table Dale and I bought at a farm sale in 1981, and four chairs. My sewing machine. Dale’s recliner. And nine boxes.
Thirty-one years in a house, and it came to one flatbed load and whatever fit in the trunk of a Buick.
The rest I gave to the Olson boy’s wife. She cried over the canning jars.
Jim stood in my new front room with his cap off, turning in a slow circle.
“Well, Judy. It’s snug.”
“It is.”
“Dale would’ve had that porch step shimmed level before I got the truck unloaded.”
“He would have,” I said.
We both laughed. Then neither of us did.
I hung my curtains. I put Dale’s recliner by the heating stove, facing the window. I set my African violets on the sill over the sink, where they could watch the trucks.
That first night the fans roared, and the two o’clock train came through and shook the water in the glass beside my bed. I lay there wide awake and thought, what in the world have you done, Judith?
The second night I slept clear through to five.
It was Todd who found out.
He drives right past the elevator on his way to the plant for first shift. On the ninth morning, a Monday, he saw my Buick parked in front of the Brandt house at a quarter to six. A light on in the window. A woman in a housecoat watering violets.
Michelle called that night at seven.
I knew from the way she said “Mom” that she knew.
“You rented a house.”
“I did.”
“From Mr. Brandt. By the elevator. Todd saw your car.”
“That’s right.”
“You have been living four blocks from me for over a week, and you let me keep asking if you’d thought about it.”
“That was wrong of me,” I said. “I should have told you the day I did it. I was afraid of this phone call, and I put it off, and that was cowardly. I’m sorry for that part.”
There was a long silence. I could hear cartoons going in the background.
“What did you pay?”
“Five hundred and fifty.”
“So it wasn’t even the money.” Her voice went up thin. “It’s two hundred and fifty dollars’ difference. You’d rather pay a stranger than your own family?”
“Mr. Brandt isn’t a stranger. And no. I’d rather be your mother than your renter, Michelle. That’s all it is.”
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