Lemon icebox pie doesn’t travel well. It wants to stay cold and flat, and I was carrying it up my son’s front walk one-handed, with a cane in the other hand and a new right knee that was five months old and still had opinions.
It was Thursday, December 25th. Katherine had thoughtfully made sure I could let myself in, which is how I got halfway down Joel’s hallway without anyone hearing me.
That’s where I learned I was moving.
My son told my daughter Nadia that my condo was hers starting January fifteenth. Two bedrooms, third floor, the one I bought alone in 2008 and paid $1,140 a month on for seventeen years. No rent, Katherine added, not until Brad found work. Brad agreed with that the way Brad agrees with anything that costs him nothing. Joel had already put my name on a list at a senior place. Nadia had already posted it. My sewing room, where my mother’s machine sits, was going to be painted purple for Gemma.
Then Joel said, “If she fusses, remind her who drove her to rehab.”
Nobody at that table told him he was wrong.
I could have walked in swinging the cane. I walked in and said Merry Christmas. I cut the pie into eight even slices and served Brad first. I lifted my glass when Joel said “To family.” Then I excused myself, locked the little bathroom by the coats, and texted Lorenzo Valdez, my broker, who’d been holding a $415,000 cash offer from an investor since November.
“Take the cash offer. 18-day closing. No contingencies.”
I ran the water so the hallway would hear a woman washing her hands.
When I sat back down, Gemma leaned over before Nadia could catch her. She’s eleven. She wanted to know which room was hers.
“Ask me on the fifteenth, honey,” I said.
Thursday, 9:40 a.m.
The rental truck turned into my old lot at 9:40 on Thursday, January 15th, and it took Brad three tries to back it in.
I was sitting on the bench by the building entrance in my good winter coat with a thermos of coffee, because I’d known they’d come early. Nadia does everything early when it’s free.
Behind the truck came Joel’s SUV. Joel driving. Katherine beside him with her sunglasses on in January, which told me she’d been crying or planned to.
Brad got out. Nadia got out. Gemma and Dominik climbed down from the middle seat with a laundry basket full of stuffed animals between them.
Nobody saw me at first. They were all looking up at the third floor, at my windows, where the blinds were open and the rooms behind them were empty.
Then the front door of the building opened and a man came out carrying a toolbox. His name was Strand. He worked for the investor. He’d spent the morning changing every lock on the unit, plus the mailbox, plus the little storage cage in the basement where I used to keep the Christmas tree.
“Can I help you folks?” he said.
“We’re moving in,” Nadia said. “3C.”
Mr. Strand looked at his clipboard like it might change its mind. “3C closed Monday, ma’am. New owner. I just finished the locks.”
“No,” Nadia said. “That’s my mom’s. It’s ours now.”
That’s when she turned around and saw me on the bench.
I lifted my thermos an inch.
“Mom,” she said. “What is this?”
“That’s Mr. Strand,” I said. “He’s very good with a drill.”
Joel came around the front of the SUV fast for a man of forty-five. “Mom. What did you do?”
“I sold my condo,” I said. “Closed Monday the twelfth. Four hundred fifteen thousand dollars, cash. Lorenzo’s very pleased.”
You’d think I’d said I set it on fire.
“You can’t,” Joel said.
“I can. It’s in the paperwork. Only my name was on it. Seventeen years, only my name.”
Nadia’s face went white and then red, the way it did when she was six and didn’t get the bigger popsicle. “Where are you even living?”
“Lenexa. A two-bedroom on the ground floor. No stairs, no elevator to wait on, a parking spot right outside the door. I signed the lease on the twenty-ninth.”
“You moved?” Brad said. “Already?”
“Brad,” I said, “I had eighteen days and nothing else to do. People who don’t have jobs get a lot done.”
He looked at his shoes. Katherine made a small noise behind her sunglasses that I believe was a laugh she tried to swallow.
Then Joel said the thing that opened the whole box.
“You don’t understand what you’ve done. You don’t understand what this costs.”
“What does it cost, Joel?”
He didn’t answer. He looked at Katherine. And Katherine took her sunglasses off, folded them, and put them in her coat pocket like she was getting ready for something physical.
“Tell her,” Katherine said.
“Kath, not here.”
“Tell her, or I will. I’ve been waiting two years to say it out loud.”
Nadia turned. “Say what?”
Katherine looked right at her sister-in-law. “Your rent, Nadia. Who did you think was paying it?”
Nadia opened her mouth and nothing came out.
“Sixteen hundred and fifty dollars,” Katherine said. “Every month, for two years. Out of our account. Out of the kids’ college fund once, when your landlord got mad in August. That’s thirty-nine thousand six hundred dollars, Nadia. I have the bank statements. I have them in a folder in my desk.”
I remembered all those months I’d thought, somebody’s covering it, it isn’t my business. I’d been right about the first part.
Nadia turned to her brother. “You said Mom was helping.”
“I never said that.”
“You said ‘it’s handled.’ I thought—” She stopped, and looked at me, and I could see it land. She’d thought it was me. She’d been taking it from me in her head, so taking my home must have felt like more of the same.
“So the condo,” I said. “That was for who, Joel?”
He didn’t say anything.
Katherine did. “He said once Nadia had your place, rent-free, we’d be done. He promised me. Christmas Eve, in our kitchen. ‘After the fifteenth, Kath, we’re out.’ That’s what this was. You were his way out of a bill.”
Mr. Strand set his toolbox down very gently on the sidewalk and went back inside the building. Smart man.
Dominik tugged on Gemma’s coat. “Are we going in?”
Gemma didn’t answer him. She was looking at me.
The envelope
There is a feeling when your grown son can’t look at you. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, and I’m telling you I’d waited three weeks for it.
“Mom,” Joel said. “I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“You told Nadia at Christmas. You told Katherine on Christmas Eve. You told a senior home, somehow. You told everybody on Nadia’s Facebook. Who was I, last?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“I was standing in your hallway, Joel.”
He finally looked at me.
“I came in with the pie,” I said. “Katherine left the door unlocked. I heard you. ‘Mom’s condo is yours January fifteenth.’ I heard the list. I heard ‘she’ll thank us.’ And I heard you tell your sister that if I fussed, she should remind me who drove me to rehab.”
Nadia put her hand over her mouth.
Brad said, “Okay, let’s everybody calm down,” which is the first full sentence I’ve ever heard him start that early in the day.
“I’m calm, Brad,” I said. “Sit in the truck if you need to.”
He did. I swear he did. He got back in the cab and shut the door.
Joel’s voice went up. “I DID drive you. Thirty-some times. Twice a week, July through October. I took off work. I sat in that waiting room with the fish tank. Was that nothing?”
“No,” I said. “That was something. I thanked you every time.”
“So what’s the problem?”
I reached into my coat and took out the envelope.
It was a plain white bank envelope. I’d written on the front in my billing-office handwriting, the handwriting that collected on twenty-nine years of hospital bills: JOEL — REHAB.
“Thirty-four rides,” I said. “I kept the appointment cards. It’s eleven miles each way from my place to the clinic and back to yours, twenty-two miles round, which is seven hundred forty-eight miles. At the federal mileage rate. Plus forty dollars an hour for your waiting-room time, which is more than I made my first ten years. Plus parking. It comes to two thousand nine hundred and eighteen dollars and forty cents.”
I held it out.
“It’s all there. Count it. I put the forty cents in a little baggie.”
“Mom, I don’t want—”
“Take it, Joel. You told your sister to use those rides on me like a bill. So I paid the bill. Now nobody can remind me of anything.”
He didn’t take it. Katherine did. She took it right out of my hand and put it in her pocket with her sunglasses.
“Thank you, Sherry,” she said. “That’s going in the college fund.”
Joel turned on her. “Are you serious right now?”
“I’m very serious. I’ve been serious for two years. You were the one who thought your mother’s house was a coupon.”
Nadia started crying then. Not pretty. The kind where your nose goes first.
“I didn’t know,” she said to me. “I swear I didn’t know it was Joel. I thought you were helping because you wanted to. I thought the condo was you wanting to too. Joel said you’d be happy.”
“Joel said I’d thank you.”
“I know.”
“Did anybody ask me, Nadia?”
She shook her head.
“Did you ask him if I said yes?”
“No.”
“You painted my sewing room purple in your head, honey. You posted it. Forty people put hearts on it. And nobody asked the woman whose mother’s sewing machine is in that room.”
She sat down on the curb, right there in the cold, next to the laundry basket of stuffed animals. Gemma went and stood next to her and put a hand on her shoulder, which made me love that girl more than I can describe.
Joel stood in the middle of the lot with his arms out like a man at a bus stop who’d just watched the bus leave.
“So what happens now?” he said. “They gave notice. Their lease is up the thirty-first. Where are they supposed to go?”
“Well, Joel,” I said. “I suppose you’ll have to drive them.”
Katherine laughed out loud. She didn’t try to swallow it this time.
“And here’s what else happens,” I said, and I stood up off the bench, which took two tries and the cane, and I didn’t hide that. Let them watch it. “You call that senior place today and take my name off the list. While I’m standing here.”
“Mom—”
“Today, Joel. Your phone’s in your hand.”
He looked at Katherine. Katherine looked at the sky.
He called. It was a place called Prairie Something. A woman answered and he said his mother’s name and asked to have it removed, and the woman asked him if his mother was aware of the application, and he stood in that parking lot with his whole family watching and said, “No. She wasn’t.”
He hung up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Mom, I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry today. Today the truck’s here.”
The fifteenth
Katherine didn’t let it go, and I’ll love her for that until I die.
Joel’s checks to Nadia stopped that same week. Katherine moved the account into her own name on Friday, the sixteenth. She told me herself on the phone, and she told me the number, because she knew I’d want it. Thirty-nine thousand, six hundred dollars over two years. She said Joel was sleeping in the den for a while, and that it was a good den, and that he’d survive.
Nadia took the post down that night. I checked. I don’t do Facebook, but I had my neighbor show me before she sold me her old recliner.
Brad got a job at the Home Depot on Metcalf on January twenty-second. Forklift, overnights. Nadia says he complains about it every morning. Nadia also says he goes.
They didn’t get my condo, and they didn’t get the rental back either; their landlord had already signed somebody new. They found a duplex in Merriam. Nine hundred square feet, second floor. Nadia paid first and last out of her own tax refund and called me afterward just to tell me she had. She didn’t ask for anything. She said, “I wanted you to know I did it.”
That was the best phone call I got all winter.
Joel came by my new place on a Sunday in February. He didn’t have an appointment card. He stood on my step holding a box of the good lemons from the store where they’re a dollar more each, and he said, “Katherine said you might make the pie again.”
“Did she.”
“She said I shouldn’t come empty-handed.”
“Katherine’s very smart.”
“I know.” He swallowed. “Mom. I took you to rehab because I wanted to. Not so I could use it. I said it at the table because I was scared of Kath, and I was tired, and I wanted it over. That’s not an excuse.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I know.”
I took the lemons. I didn’t ask him in that day. That was on my say, and he understood that, and he went home. He came back the next Sunday and I let him carry a bag of potting soil to the patio. We’re getting there. Slow, like the cane.
And the fifteenth. I’d made a promise on the fifteenth.
What I hadn’t told anybody in that parking lot was where my mother’s sewing machine went.
It took two men to carry it up to the third floor in 2008. It took two men, Lorenzo’s nephew and his friend Hamza, to carry it into the second bedroom of my ground-floor rental in Lenexa on December thirtieth, while I stood in the doorway with my cane and told them to mind the treadle.
The room is small. It gets afternoon sun. One wall is purple.
I painted it myself, sitting on a stool, in the first week of January, because I’d already had the paint picked out by then, before I knew if anybody would ever see it. Lavender, not grape. I have some taste.
Nadia brought the kids for the first time on a Saturday in March. Brad waited in the car. Nadia came in. She stood in my kitchen and looked at everything, my same table, my same yellow canisters, the cane hooked on the counter’s edge, and she said, “It’s nice, Mom,” in a voice that meant she’d been ready for it not to be.
Dominik found the TV in about four seconds.
Gemma walked down the hall the way she does everything, slow, with her whole face.
She stopped in the doorway of the second bedroom.
The machine was under the window, where my mother kept hers, with the cover off and a spool of red thread on it. A daybed against the purple wall, with a quilt I’d been piecing since Thanksgiving out of scraps from thirty years of my sewing. A little bookshelf. A lamp shaped like a cat, which I’m not proud of, but the girl at the store said eleven-year-olds love them.
“Grandma,” Gemma said. “Whose room is this?”
“Well,” I said. “Some days it’s my sewing room.”
She waited. She’s like me that way.
“And some days, when you’re here, it’s yours. You can sleep in it. You can learn the machine. My mother taught me on that one when I was your age.”
Gemma went and touched the wheel of the machine with one finger, very carefully, the way you’d touch a sleeping dog.
Nadia was standing behind me in the hall. I heard her breath catch, and I didn’t turn around. Some things a daughter should get to have on her own.
“You said to ask you on the fifteenth,” Gemma said.
“I did.”
“I didn’t, though. Mom said not to.”
“I know, honey.”
She turned around and looked at me, eleven years old in the afternoon sun, in front of the purple wall.
“Grandma,” she said. “Which room is mine?”
I leaned the cane against the doorframe and sat down on the daybed beside her, the new knee and the old one both, and pulled the quilt’s corner over her lap.
“This one,” I said.
Family tensions can surface at the worst moments – read about a father’s cruel words at his wife’s bedside and a husband who laughed while his wife managed dinner on a cane. There’s also the story of a sister who took advantage of someone’s recovery.
