For my 75th birthday I rented a $4,600 lake house and fed my daughter’s whole family for three days. Then I heard my son-in-law tell her, “Babe, your mother’s a widow on a pension. She’ll take the porch cot and say thanks.” So I took the porch cot, because since January I’d been writing down every dollar he ever asked me for.
The house had one bedroom on the ground floor, with a walk-in shower and a grab bar, and it was the ONLY thing about that weekend I’d asked for.
My knees don’t do stairs anymore.
I was coming up from the dock with a bag of ice when his voice came out the kitchen screen.
“We’re the couple, so we take downstairs. My folks get the loft. Colette, your mother’s a widow on a pension. She’ll take the porch cot and say thanks.”
My daughter laughed.
“She won’t care. Mom’s gotten easy since Dad.”
Easy.
Franklin and I had fifty-one years together, and four years after his funeral that was the word my own child had for what was left of me.
I stood on the bottom step while the ice went soft against my hip.
I’d found the house on Table Rock Lake in March and paid all three nights up front.
I’d bought Mauricio’s bourbon and the oat milk Colette likes.
I’d invited his parents, Efrain and Adele, because Colette said it would mean a lot to him.
His duffel bag was already on the downstairs bed when I came in.
“There she is,” Mauricio said. “We grabbed the bottom room. That work for you, Rhoda?”
“That works.”
His parents pulled in twenty minutes later. Their bags went up to the loft.
Adele hugged me with her sunglasses still on.
“Look at this view, Rhoda. We can’t thank you enough.”
Efrain looked around the living room, then at me.
“And you’re in which room?”
Mauricio answered from the hallway before I could.
“She wanted the porch. Says she likes falling asleep to the water.”
I looked at him.
He looked right back.
I had never said ONE word about the water.
Adele frowned. “On her birthday weekend?”
“Her idea,” Mauricio said. “She wanted me and Colette to have a real bed for once. We haven’t had a night off since I bought the second truck.”
Efrain turned to me.
“Rhoda. That right?”
I could have told him. It was right there in my mouth.
“Whatever keeps the peace, Efrain.”
Mauricio smiled down at the floor like he’d won a hand of cards.
That smile told me what he’d decided about me a long time ago.
I would always pick quiet over a fight.
And I’d given him two years of reasons to think so.
After Franklin died, Mauricio’s landscaping company needed help. Then it needed a little more.
A truck payment.
Payroll, just this once.
A trailer, and a lawyer over some customer’s fence.
In twenty-six months I had sent him $112,000.
Every time it was a bad quarter, and every time next spring would fix it.
Spring never fixed anything.
In January I bought a green spiral notebook, the same kind Franklin kept his gas mileage in, and I started writing it down. The date. The amount. The reason he gave, in his own words.
I didn’t think he was a crook. I just couldn’t make the numbers add up.
The cot smelled like sunscreen and somebody else’s dog.
At dinner Mauricio stood up holding the wine I’d paid for.
“To Rhoda. Colette and I wanted to give her a birthday she’d never forget.”
Efrain put his fork down.
“I thought Rhoda rented this place.”
Mauricio laughed. “We all pitched in, Pop.”
Adele was watching her son.
“You phoned me Tuesday and said Rhoda was paying for EVERYTHING. You said it TWICE.”
“Ma, you’ve got it mixed up.”
“I don’t.”
Nobody yelled.
Efrain stopped talking. Adele didn’t look away from him. Colette cut her steak into smaller and smaller pieces.
Mauricio poured himself more wine.
I was out on the porch with my coffee the next morning when Adele came out in her robe.
“We’re switching tonight. You take the loft, we’ll take the cot.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Yes, I do.”
Efrain came out behind her.
“This whole place is on your dime. You are NOT sleeping next to the kayaks.”
Mauricio pushed through the door with a mug. “What’s all this?”
“Rhoda spent her birthday on a cot,” Efrain said. “We’re figuring out why.”
“Pop, she asked for—”
“Stop,” Adele said.
Efrain sat down at the porch table and rubbed his face with both hands.
Then he did what fathers do. He tried to make it okay.
“Listen, Rhoda, he’s had a rough year. But this kid still put a new roof on our house in June. Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars. Wouldn’t take one PENNY back from us.”
Colette’s head came up.
Mauricio looked at the lake.
Eighteen thousand four hundred.
I knew that number. I’d written it in green ink.
I went to the cot and got the notebook out of my bag.
I opened it to June and set it next to Efrain’s coffee.
“Efrain,” I said, “WHAT DAY DID THE ROOFERS COME?”
Mauricio reached across the table and put his whole hand flat on the page.
The eleventh, a Thursday
Efrain didn’t look at the hand. He looked at me.
“The eleventh,” he said. “Thursday. They were up there by seven, banging. Adele couldn’t hear the TV.”
“Pop, this is her checkbook stuff. It’s private.”
“Then why is your hand on it, mijo?”
Mauricio didn’t move it. So Efrain took his son by the wrist, the way you’d lift a cat off a kitchen counter, and set the hand down on the table beside the page.
He got his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket. Efrain reads everything out loud. Menus, cereal boxes, the side of a bus.
“June eighth. Eighteen thousand four hundred. Check twenty-two seventeen.” He stopped and found the line again. “‘Hail claim fell through on the Chopra job. Crew walks Friday if I can’t make payroll.'”
Then he read it a second time with his mouth closed.
Monday the money left my account. Thursday his father had shingles.
Adele set her coffee down on the porch boards instead of the table, like she didn’t trust her hand to find the table.
Colette was standing behind Efrain’s chair now. She had her phone in one hand and nothing to do with it.
“Mom,” she said. “Since when do you write checks to Mauricio?”
Franklin’s glove box
Franklin kept a green notebook in the glove box of every car we ever owned.
Every fill-up, he wrote the date, the gallons, the odometer. He said a car tells you it’s sick in the numbers a month before it tells you in the engine. I used to tease him about it on long drives. He’d tap the cover and say, “Laugh. You’ll want this someday.”
He also ordered duplicate checks, the kind with a yellow carbon under every one, because the bank would tell you whatever the bank wanted to tell you. After he died I kept reordering them. I never asked myself why. It was just what our checks looked like.
The first time Mauricio asked me for money, Franklin had been in the ground about two hours.
It was the funeral lunch, in the church basement kitchen. I was wrapping leftover ham in foil because nobody else would, and Mauricio came in with his tie pulled loose and leaned on the counter next to the deviled eggs.
“I hate to do this today, Rhoda.”
It was a truck payment. Thirty-two hundred, two months behind.
“Colette’s too proud to ask her own mother. So I’m asking. Let’s keep it between us. She’d die if she knew.”
I wrote the check right there on the counter with a pen from the guest book.
That became the shape of it. He’d call on a weekday, when Colette was at work in the front office of the middle school. He’d say he hated to ask. He’d say keep it between us. Some checks he wanted made out to Colon Lawn & Land. Some he wanted made out to him, because the bank was funny about business deposits, he said, and I didn’t know enough about business banks to say otherwise.
At Easter Colette brought a paper certificate to dinner and propped it against the gravy boat. Three years at the school without one sick day.
“Not ONE, Mom,” she said.
“She’d go in with a broken leg,” Mauricio said, and everybody laughed, me too.
In February he called and said Colette needed a procedure, something with a deductible, and she didn’t want me to know. Six thousand. I sent it. Then I sent tulips to the school office with a card that said Get well, I love you, no need to call.
She never called. I thought that was the pride.
That’s who I was to them. A woman with a pension and a pen.
And now Efrain had his thumb on June, and my daughter wanted an answer.
The yellow carbons were in my purse, on the cot, under my cardigan.
The stove
Mauricio laughed first.
It was a good laugh. It’s the one he uses on customers when the sod dies.
“Pop. Come on. Look at me. You know what this is?” He tapped the notebook without touching the page. “She writes everything down. She’s been doing it since Franklin. Lists on the fridge, lists in the car. Colette. Tell them about the stove.”
“Mauricio.”
“Tell them, babe.”
Colette looked at the lake. “She left a burner on in August. That’s all. The pan was fine.”
“The pan was BLACK. I scraped it.”
He sat down next to his father, close, the way you sit next to somebody at a hospital.
“That eighteen was a loan for the company. Payroll. It’s in the company. The roof was a whole separate thing. I took a line of credit for the roof, Pop. You think I’d take Rhoda’s money and put it on your house?”
Efrain took his glasses off.
He wanted that to be true. You could see it on him. A man who has had a son for fifty years wants the son.
“Ask him for the loan papers,” I said.
“On a Saturday? At a lake?” Mauricio spread his hands. “You want me to call the bank from the dock, Rhoda? Happy birthday, everybody, let’s all get on hold.”
“These things get mixed up,” Efrain said. “Money moves around in a business. Rhoda, I’m not saying.”
He didn’t finish what he wasn’t saying.
Adele didn’t say anything. She was looking at the notebook. Not the June page. The cover.
Colette walked over behind my chair and put her hand on my shoulder, and for one second I thought she was coming to my side.
“Mom. It’s your birthday. Maybe put the notebook away for now.”
Mauricio nodded at her like she’d done well.
Then he looked at me, and he smiled the card-game smile again.
“Put the book away, Rhoda. Before you say something you can’t take back.”
Check 2217
I got up.
My knees took their time about it. Everybody waited, which was worse than if they’d talked.
I went to the cot and moved my cardigan and took the checkbook out of my purse. It’s the long kind, in the brown vinyl cover the bank gives you, and it’s thick from all the yellow.
I sat back down and turned the carbons until I found it.
Twenty-two seventeen.
I laid it on the table next to the notebook, flat, the way you lay a card down when you’re done bluffing.
Pay to the order of: Mauricio Colon. Eighteen thousand four hundred and 00/100. Memo: payroll.
Not the company. Him.
“That’s the same thing,” Mauricio said, fast. “It’s an LLC, the business is me, that’s how it works. Pop, it’s how it works.”
Efrain wasn’t listening. He had his own phone out, holding it far from his face, scrolling with one heavy finger.
“Your crew walks Friday,” he said. “That’s what you told her.”
“It was bad, Pop. It was a bad week.”
“Hassan was on my roof.”
Mauricio stopped.
“Thursday,” Efrain said. “Hassan and the tall kid. In your shirts. Carrying bundles up the ladder all morning while the roofers nailed. I took pictures because your mother wanted to send them to her sister. I asked Hassan, aren’t you missing work? He said, This is work, Mr. Colon. Boss has us here all day.“
He turned the phone around and set it face up on the yellow carbon.
Hassan was on the ridge of Efrain’s roof, waving, in a Colon Lawn & Land shirt.
February fourteenth
Nobody touched the phone.
Colette reached past me and picked up the notebook. I let her. It was the first time she’d asked me for anything in two years, even if she didn’t ask.
She started at January. She read the way she reads attendance slips, fast, lips moving a little.
“Truck. Trailer. Lawyer.” She turned a page. “Payroll. Payroll. Insurance.”
She stopped on a line in February.
“February fourteenth. Six thousand.” She read the reason out in his words, because that’s how I’d written it. “‘Colette’s surgery deductible. She doesn’t want you to know.'”
She looked up.
“What surgery?”
Mauricio said her name.
“What surgery, Mauricio?”
“That one was the truck. I wrote the wrong thing. I mean, I said the wrong thing, I was stressed, the transmission…”
“Three years,” Colette said. “I haven’t missed a day in three years. I have a CERTIFICATE.”
She turned more pages. Her finger stopped again.
“‘Colette’s car.’ Four thousand.” She laughed, and it wasn’t a laugh. “My car is a 2011 Corolla. Dad bought it. It has two hundred thousand miles on it.”
Efrain put his hand over his mouth.
Colette turned to her husband, and then she said the thing I hadn’t known I’d been waiting four years to hear.
“You told me you asked her. When the second truck came. You said you asked my mother for help and she said Dad’s money wasn’t for us.” Her voice went up at the end. “You said she said that. You said she didn’t even think about it.”
“Babe.”
“I stopped calling her. Do you get that? I stopped calling my mother.”
She looked at me.
“Did you think I had surgery?”
“I sent you tulips,” I said.
Colette set the notebook down very carefully, like it was hot.
“He told me the tulips were from him.”
The downstairs bedroom
Mauricio stood up.
I think he’d decided that if everybody was going to look at him, he’d rather be looking down.
“Okay. Okay. Everybody wants to do this. Let’s do this.” He put both hands on the back of his chair. “Yeah. I said Colette. You know why? Because she says yes for Colette. She never said yes for me, not once, not without that face. So I said Colette.”
“Mijo,” Efrain said.
“No, Pop, you wanted to know. Her husband left her a paid-off house and a pension and a savings account, and she sits in it. She sits in that house with the TV on. I have eleven guys. Eleven families. You know what a skid steer costs? Do you?”
Nobody did.
“And your roof.” He pointed at his father. “You’re welcome. Where’d you think I got eighteen grand, mowing? You didn’t ask. You were happy. Ma was happy, she sent pictures to her sister.”
“You lied to us in our own kitchen,” Adele said.
“I gave you a ROOF, Ma.”
“You gave us her roof.”
He turned to Colette, and his voice went soft, which was the worst part.
“Babe. You said it yourself. Yesterday. ‘Mom’s gotten easy.’ Your words. I didn’t make anything up. I just used what you gave me.”
Colette’s face went red from the neck up. She didn’t answer him.
He looked at me last.
“And where’s she going to go, huh? Who’s she got? She’s got us. Christmas, Thanksgiving, her birthday, it’s us. Who else is she going to give it to?” He waved at the water. “The lake?”
That was all of it, finally out on the table with the coffee. He’d done the math on me a long time before I started doing it on him.
I didn’t answer him.
I got up and went inside, past the stove, down the short hall to the bedroom with the grab bar.
His duffel bag was on the end of the bed. Colette’s things were on the dresser, her face cream, her charger. I left hers. I picked up his.
It was heavier than the ice.
I carried it back past the fridge and out the screen door and set it on the porch cot, next to the kayaks.
Then I went back in for my suitcase, the small one, and wheeled it down the hall and stood it up next to the bed.
When I came back out, nobody had moved.
“Checkout is Sunday at ten,” I said. “The house is in my name. There won’t be any more checks.”
Mauricio looked at the duffel on the cot like it was somebody else’s dog.
“You’re going to throw away your family over a NOTEBOOK?”
I picked up the notebook and the checkbook and held them against my chest.
“I wrote down every dollar, Mauricio. You’d think I’d know what it cost.”
He grabbed the duffel off the cot. He went down the porch steps without the mug. At the bottom he turned around.
“Colette. Get your stuff.”
She stayed in her chair.
“Colette.”
“Mom said I’m in the loft,” Colette said.
Efrain stood up then, slowly, and walked down the steps after his son, and I don’t know what he said in that driveway, because I didn’t follow. Adele stayed with us. She put her hand on top of Colette’s on the table and left it there.
The truck door slammed. Gravel went up the drive.
Colette didn’t stand up.
The stairs at home
It’s October now.
The $112,000 is gone. I know where every dollar of it went, and I know I’m not getting it back. The notebook ends on the June page with a line drawn under it in green.
Efrain and Adele send a check on the first of the month. Two hundred dollars, roof on the memo line, in Adele’s handwriting. I told them they didn’t have to. Efrain said a man pays for his own roof. I write each one in the back of the notebook, going the other way.
Colette hasn’t missed a day at the school.
She moved some things into her old room in September. Not everything. She says she’s thinking. I don’t ask her what about.
This morning I came in from the yard with a bag of potting soil against my hip and her duffel was sitting at the foot of the stairs.
“Which room, Mom?” she said. “I can take the couch down here if you want.”
“Yours,” I said. “Upstairs. My knees don’t do stairs.”
She picked up the duffel and carried it up.
If somebody you love has been keeping a quiet list of their own, send this to them tonight and let them know you’d read it.
For more family drama over money and inheritance, read about a brother who gave away his father’s store, siblings dividing up their mother’s house, and a stepmother selling tickets to a father’s Bronco.
