mother a new car, so I could have her minivan, which was old, but big and safe and reliable.
I didn’t press him after that. My parents didn’t discuss finances with me, but I had a good idea of why my mother was still driving the same minivan that she had been driving since I was in grade school, and why we had canceled our membership to the country club, and why I was only encouraged to apply for a college where I could get in-state tuition. My father was still making a good income, but there had been some bad investments, and then the nursing homes for both grandmothers, and then the funerals, and then the problems with the house.
My mother had been the first to notice the dark patches on the ceiling in the upstairs hallway. The night they got the estimate for a new roof, they stayed up late and argued, their words rising up from the heating vent in my room. My father said they would have to go into the retirement money, but my mother didn’t want to. He held firm. She was being ridiculous, he said. They had to pay off credit cards, and the home equity loan. The interest rates were killing them. She needed to do the math. They had plenty of time before he retired, and in just a few years, there would be no more nursing home bills, and no more funerals, no more poorly chosen stocks, and I would be the only one in school. He would reinvest in their retirement then. Smooth sailing, my father told her. For now, they just needed to get out of debt.
Of course, the roof repair ended up costing more than either of them could have known. After my father came home to find the Sleeping Roofer in his bed, it was pretty clear to all of us he would not be buying my mother a new car after all.
“Divorce is expensive,” he told me, not long after he’d moved out. “Damn lawyers.” He tried to laugh, but he looked a little dazed, and still as shocked as I was by what my mother had done. He was just getting over the flu, he said. His courtroom baritone was croaky. He’d aready gained some weight in his belly—my mother had been the one to monitor how much butter and salt he used.
“I can keep up with your tuition, no problem,” he said, his gaze avoiding my face. “I don’t want you to worry about that. But money’s a little tight. In fact, if you could think of any way to offset some expenses, I would very much appreciate that.”
So I returned to the dorm my junior year, this time as a resident assistant. I got three meals a day and a single room. In exchange, I had to attend a two-week summer training rife with workshops on things like fire safety, eating disorders, and CPR; during the year, I had to be in the dorm from six p.m. on for seven or eight nights a month in case there happened to be a fire, an eating disorder, or a youthful heart attack. The only other thing I was supposed to do was come up with a variety of event programming to make the dorm feel smaller and less institutional, at least for the freshman girls on my floor.
“I’m sorry,” my mother wrote in an e-mail. “I know you were excited about an apartment.” I could not tell if she meant “sorry” in the universal sense, just extending sympathy, or if she were specifically sorry for her actions, namely, having a slumber party with the Roofer. It was hard to know if she felt sorry about that at all. In those first few months after my father moved into a condo by the Plaza, my mother actually seemed happy, though the Roofer had long disappeared; she presented herself as pleasantly uncertain about what her future held—she didn’t know whether she would stay in the house or move to another part of town, or even to another city. She didn’t know if she wanted to go back to school. “I’m catching my breath,” she told both me and Elise. “I’m just going to wait a bit before I make any decisions.”
But by the time I moved home for summer break, there was a Realtor’s sign in the front yard, though she did not appear ready for any kind of open house. Elise’s room, my father’s study,