I called Mom at nine o’clock, which is late for her.
She answered on the second ring with the television going in the background. Some show about people buying houses on tropical islands.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
Mothers don’t say hello after eight-thirty.
I told her everything. Tammy. The boys. Saturday. And I told her about the gas bills, which I’d never once told her in six years.
She was quiet for a long time.
“Well,” she said finally. “Isn’t that something.”
“Mom,” I said. “What’s going on with your lease?”
That was the thing I’d been carrying around in my head the whole drive home.
Mom’s lease at the Meadowbrook Apartments was up on October 31st. Ten days away. A new management company out of Indianapolis had bought the complex in the summer, and in August they’d sent every tenant a letter on fancy letterhead.
Her rent was going up $175 a month. From $790 to $965.
On a school cook’s income, with her retiring at Christmas break, that was not a small thing. She’d be living on her pension from the school corporation and an early Social Security check. She’d been fretting about it for two months and pretending to me that she wasn’t.
“I was going to talk to you and your daddy after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I was going to sign on for six more months and then see.”
“You don’t have to sign anything,” I said. “You own half a house.”
“Shane.”
“You were always going to retire there, Mom. That was the plan. That was the whole plan from the very beginning. You said it at the closing. I was sitting right there.”
“I am not going over there to fight your daddy,” she said. “I am 64 years old, and I have not been in a room with that man for longer than a funeral in twenty years. I’m not starting with a fight.”
“You’re not fighting,” I said. “You’re moving home.”
She didn’t say anything for so long I thought the call had dropped. I could hear the island show in the background. Somebody was very excited about a kitchen with an ocean view.
“The front bedroom gets the morning sun,” she said, very quietly.
“It does.”
“June’s violets would like that.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t ask. I just said I’d take Friday off and borrow a trailer and be at her apartment by seven.
After we hung up, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time with the deed still lying open in front of me.
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