PART 2: The Can on the Fridge
“No,” Tara said. “Nobody’s writing anything today.”
Her voice came out steady. Mine would not have.
Mitch turned around with the phone still in his hand. “Tara. Honey. This is a five-minute thing.”
“It’s eighteen hundred dollars.” She said it loud enough for the whole row of chairs. “And it’s my mother’s roof.”
A woman across the room gathered her purse and moved two seats down. A nurse at the desk looked up but didn’t come over yet.
Mitch lowered his voice. “You’re making a scene.”
“You just asked a widow for her roof money in a hospital waiting room.” Tara’s veil slid off her arm and pooled on the carpet. “I’ll make whatever scene I want.”
I heard myself say his name. “Mitch.”
He looked at me. I stood up. My knees were not happy about it.
“I’m going to say this once,” I said. “Then I’m going to sit back down.”
“Charlene—”
“Twenty-six hundred dollars. A hundred a month, starting the first of October. That’s forty dollars more than the minimum you offered nobody, because you never offered anything.”
He blinked. “I said I’d pay you.”
“You said a lot of things at my kitchen table.” My voice was shaking but it was out. “And I’m telling you now, I will never front, cover, or co-sign for you again. Not for a hall. Not for a house. Not for a bag of ice.”
The waiting room had gone completely still. The television up in the corner was playing a cooking show with the sound off. I remember a man on it flipping an omelet.
Mitch’s jaw worked. “Fine. I’m sorry if the timing was bad.”
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s not an apology. That’s you being sorry I noticed.” I sat back down. My legs were done. “I’ve been polite for three years. I’m finished being polite.”
Tara picked her veil up off the floor. Her hands were shaking too, which somehow made me feel better.
“We’re not getting married today,” she said.
Mitch stared at her. “Tara. My mother is in surgery.”
“I know. I’m staying until she’s out. I’ll sit here with her and hold her hand and bring her ice chips.” Tara’s chin came up. “But I’m not walking down an aisle behind this. Not today.”
She sat down next to me and took my hand. Hers was cold. I held it anyway.
*
Yvonne came out of recovery at two in the afternoon, groggy and asking for her lipstick. The surgery had gone clean. She’d be in for four days.
She looked at her son standing there in a tuxedo, and at my daughter in a wedding dress, and she said, “Did I ruin it?”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” Tara said, and meant it.
Mitch stood in the corner with his tie in his fist and didn’t say one word.
*
He came to my porch three weeks later with cash folded in his hand. Two hundred dollars.
“That’s the first of it,” he said.
I counted it in front of him and put it in the can. He watched me do it. He looked like a man who’d been up nights.
“I’m sorry about the waiting room,” he said.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I was scared about my mom and I put it on you. That wasn’t fair.”
I let him stand there a minute. Then I said, “That’s better. It’s not fixed. But it’s better.”
“I know.”
“Say it again in October when it’s not a bad week.”
He came back in October with a hundred dollars and said it again, and that time I believed him a little more.
*
Tara sat at my kitchen table one night in September with a cup of tea and told me she’d almost married him in the spring instead, small, just family, so nobody would have to know.
“You can’t marry somebody so nobody has to know,” I told her.
“I know.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Mom. That stain’s bigger.”
“I’m aware.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me he owed you? I would have gone after him.”
I thought about it. “Because I raised you not to beg. I guess I forgot it goes both ways.”
She stayed until the tea went cold.
*
They married the next spring at the little church on Water Street. Potluck at the VFW hall after. I made twelve pies and Tara’s friend Deb brought the paper plates.
No caterer. Nobody’s name on a balance sheet.
Mitch’s mother sat in the front pew with a new perm and cried through the whole thing. At the hall, Mitch came up to me with a plate in one hand and a hundred dollars folded under it.
“That’s eight,” he said. “Sixteen to go.”
“You can put that in the can yourself,” I said.
He did.
*
The roof still leaks. The stain is shaped like Ohio and a piece of Kentucky now.
But last Saturday I stood on the step stool and set the coffee can back on top of the fridge, lid on, and it was heavier than it had been in a year.