My son-in-law slid a sheet of notebook paper across the kitchen table. There was one number on it, circled twice.
$800.
“That’s rent, utilities, and your share of the groceries,” my daughter said. She had both hands wrapped around a coffee mug that had gone cold a long time 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 during harvest. A low, steady roar, like a river that never gets anywhere.
I looked down at the paper. It had been 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 on top of each other, 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. He wouldn’t look at me. “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, comes to $1,640 a month. I kept the books at the lumber yard for twenty-two years, so I did not need a pencil for this. 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 Christmas for two grandchildren.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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