Chapter Seventeen
Iva Prosser called me at four minutes past eight on Friday morning.
“He’s out. Took him till last night and he left the stove filthy. You still want it?”
“Yes.”
“Come at ten and don’t bring your kids the first time.”
The duplex on Bardwell is a hundred-year-old house that somebody cut in half in about 1968. Brown asphalt shingle siding. Two front doors side by side under one porch roof, and an outside staircase up the back to the upper unit, which was mine.
Two bedrooms. A kitchen with a window over the sink, which I stood in front of for a second longer than I needed to. A bathroom with a tub that had a rust stain shaped like a comma. Carpet in the living room that had been beige at one time and had been walked on since.
Downstairs there was an old man named Dorsey with a beagle who barked at the mail and nothing else.
Out the back window, a gravel lot and a maple that had already lost most of it.
It was the ugliest place I had ever considered living in and I wanted it so badly my hands went cold in my coat pockets.
Then we sat down at her kitchen table downstairs and did the numbers, and the numbers did not work.
Here is where I was on the first of November.
I’d started with two thousand three hundred and forty. Nine nights at the Riverbend had taken seven hundred and eleven. Gas, food, the laundromat, the seventy-five-dollar lawyer, and the drugstore had taken about three hundred more.
And on Tuesday night I had sat on a motel bed and paid five hundred and eighty dollars to the State of Ohio and an online continuing education provider, because there is no version of this where I get my license back without doing that first.
I had seven hundred and forty-nine dollars.
Rent was a thousand and fifty. The deposit was another thousand and fifty. Two thousand one hundred, before the power company, which I did not yet know was going to want a hundred and seventy-five from me on top of everything because I have no credit history and am, on paper, a stranger.
I was one thousand three hundred and fifty-one dollars short of a place to live, with a hearing on the twelfth.
So on Friday afternoon I drove to Merrill’s on Delmar, which has been in that block since before I was born, and I sold my engagement ring.
The man behind the counter was about seventy and he was extremely kind about it, which made it worse.
He put the loupe on it and turned it under the lamp for a long time.
“Can I ask what you were told about this?”
“A little over a carat. Eleven thousand dollars, in 2013.”
He set it down on the velvet pad and pushed his glasses up onto his forehead.
“It’s a hair over six tenths,” he said. “It’s a nice stone.
It’s got a good cut on it. But it’s an I color and it’s got an inclusion at about two o’clock that you’d see with a loupe and never with your eye.
” He turned the pad around so I could see.
“Retail on this in 2013, in this town, four thousand, maybe forty-five hundred.”
I stood there in a jewelry store on Delmar Street and laughed at the ceiling, one syllable, and he waited politely for me to be finished.
Eleven thousand dollars. He told me that in the truck. He told my mother that at Thanksgiving. He told his own mother that, and Vivian repeated it to her sister at the rehearsal dinner where I could hear her.
He’d been lying to me about the size of a rock on my finger for eleven years for no reason at all except that lying was the shape of his mouth.
“I can do four eighty,” Merrill said.
“That’s fine.”
“You can think about it. People come back about this one.”
“I’m not going to think about it.”
He counted it out in twenties and put it in an envelope and did not say one single word about my situation, and I have gone back to that store twice since to buy things I did not need.
Twelve hundred and twenty-nine dollars.
Iva Prosser looked at me across her kitchen table for a while.
“First month’s six hundred,” she said. “Not a thousand fifty. He left that stove the way he left it and you’re going to spend a Saturday on your knees in front of it, and I’d rather pay you in rent than argue about it.
December it goes to the real number. The deposit you’ll do at two hundred a month starting December, and I write all of that into the lease, so it isn’t a favor, it’s a term.
You miss one and I’ll be unpleasant about it. ”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got an empty unit and a slow month, and because you looked at the stove and didn’t say anything about it.” She got a pen out of a coffee can. “Don’t make it a thing.”
I signed a lease on the first of November.
Seven hundred and seventy-five out the door with the power deposit. Four hundred and fifty-four dollars left in the world.
And at the top of the second page, in twelve-point type, on the line that said TENANT, printed by a woman with a coffee can full of pens:
Nora Shaw Kessler.
That was the first document in eleven years with my name on it and nobody else’s, and I sat in my car in front of that house and read it four times.
Then I went and got my children out of a motel and drove them to a place with nothing in it.
I mean nothing. Not a chair, not a fork, not a shower curtain. Two duffel bags in the middle of a beige carpet and a bathtub with a rust stain.
Ruby thought it was fantastic. She ran the length of it twice, went in both closets, and announced that the maple out back was hers.
Jonah walked the whole floor once, looked at the back door, and said, “This lock’s the kind you can open with a card.”
“I know.”
“Okay,” he said, and put his backpack down against the wall by that door, straps out.
We slept on the floor Friday night on the two motel comforters, which I stole, and I lay there listening to Dorsey’s furnace cycle and doing the same math over and over, and at six in the morning I got up and started scrubbing the stove.
Priya Raman showed up Sunday at ten with a Silverado.
I had not asked her. I had said maybe nine words to her in my life at that point.
“Bernie’s got a big mouth,” she said, out the window. “My brother-in-law’s truck is a rental in his heart. Where do you want a bunk bed.”
There was a bunk bed in the back of that truck, disassembled, wrapped in two moving blankets, with a Ziploc bag of hardware taped to one rail.
“That’s my sister’s kids’. They outgrew it in August and it’s been in my garage making me insane.
” She swung the door open. “There’s also a kitchen table with a bad leg, four chairs that don’t match, a couch I’m not proud of, and a box of dishes my mother-in-law gave us that I have hated for six years.
You are doing me a favor. Please understand that this is not charity, this is a garage. ”
It took the two of us and Jonah four hours.
Priya swore at the bunk bed hardware in two languages and got Ruby to hand her the Allen key and made a running commentary about my ex-husband without ever once asking me a question about him, which is a skill, and at two in the afternoon she sat down on the floor of my kitchen with her back against the cabinets and ate a peanut butter sandwich off a paper towel.
“You’re coming Wednesday,” she said. “To the job.”
“Yes.”
“Good. They’ve got the intake calls in a shoebox. Actual shoebox.”
Corinne Tate called on Monday.
She has a low, unhurried voice and she does not do small talk. She said she was the guardian ad litem, that her job is the children and not either parent, that she would be forming her own opinion and it was not going to be based on what anybody told her about anybody.
She wanted to see the apartment Wednesday at five, and she wanted to see the children at her office on Thursday, separately, one at a time, no parents in the room.
Then she said, “Your husband’s coming Thursday too. I’ve got you at noon and him at two.”
I spent Monday and Tuesday getting that apartment ready the way you’d get ready for a licensing exam.
I scrubbed the kitchen until the linoleum gave up.
I bought two sets of sheets and two real blankets at the Target on Route 8 and got rid of the motel comforters.
I put a lamp in the kids’ room. I put a small folding table under the window for Ruby to draw at, and I hung a shelf over Jonah’s bunk with three books on it and the plastic frame from the county, at the height where he could see it from the bed.
I put the food in the cabinets facing out. I have never in my life arranged food to be looked at and I did it anyway.
And on the kitchen table I laid out, squared up, in a folder with a rubber band around it: the lease with my name on the tenant line, Bernie’s offer letter on the letterhead with the sun, the reinstatement receipt from the Ohio board, the printout showing eleven of my twenty CE hours already done, both adoption decrees, and the school attendance record for the last two weeks showing not one absence.
Wednesday at four I did a final walk-through of my own home the way a stranger would.
Clean. Cold. Correct.
And bare. Every wall in that apartment was bare.
Ruby was at the folding table with the markers Priya had thrown in the box.
“Mom,” she said. “Where’s my picture?”
“Which one, baby.”
“The one of all of us. With the words on it.”
I stood in the middle of that living room and remembered exactly where it was.
Pressed flat inside a heavy cookbook, on a shelf above a coffee maker, in a kitchen with a window over the sink that turns into a mirror at night.
“It’s at the house,” I said.
“Which house?”
“The old one.”
She thought about that for a second, working it through with the marker still in her hand.
“Is he going to keep it?”
I did not have an answer for her.
I have not stopped thinking about the fact that my six-year-old worked out, before I did, that a man will keep a thing for no other reason than because you want it.