I turned out the light and stood still for a moment, trying to think if I should ask her to stop saying thank you. No, I decided. That would just make everything more awkward. That would make us both feel worse.
I had almost groped my way back to my bed when she started talking.
“I’m just out of money.” Her voice came out of the darkness, monotone, objective, a newscaster reporting misfortune that had happened to someone else. “That’s really all I can tell you. There’s no secret. That’s just all I know. I shouldn’t have taken on the house instead of cash. That was my first mistake. I thought I couldn’t bear to sell it, but then I had to anyway, and by then the market had slowed, and it took a long time to sell. I didn’t talk to you or Elise about it because I didn’t want to worry you. And then there was mold in the attic, water damage. Dan said that it happened after he left, that he wasn’t respons—”
Here she stopped, apparently remembering that Dan was also my father. For several minutes, we lay in silence. I could hear an engine revving in the parking lot, a muffled television in someone else’s room. My mother is homeless, I thought. My mother is homeless and living with me in my dorm. I was being dramatic. It wasn’t true. She just needed a place to stay for a while, and only because of the dog.
She cleared her throat and started again. The sum of it wasn’t anyone’s fault, she said. It was more a series of unfortunate incidents, one after the other, boxing her in. Or out. In September, she’d cracked a molar on a popcorn kernel and had to get a root canal, and she was no longer on my father’s health plan. She was still looking for a steady teaching job, she said, something with benefits; she was having a hard time with that, of course, since she hadn’t used her degree in over twenty years. But she was subbing, and she was putting in fifteen hours a week at DeBeck’s. She had thought she would be okay. She’d planned on just living simply until something better came along, or until the divorce settlement was adjusted.
“It sounds fair, just cutting everything in half.” She paused to yawn. “But we had so much debt. And my…future earning potential needs to be taken into account.”
Potential. Usually a good word. But here, it was turned around, as in lack of. I tried to think of something nice to say. “You sound like a lawyer,” I said. “I’m impressed.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m quoting mine.” She did not laugh. “Anyway, then I got evicted, because of Bowzer. I already found a place that will take dogs. I can afford the rent. But it won’t be available until next week. I need to wait until next Friday anyway, when I get a check, so I can pay the security deposit. I lost the last one because of the dog.”
She was silent for a while after that, but I lay awake, listening. Someone running down the hallway laughed, loud and shrill. And I could hear Marley’s French horn, the same three notes played over and over. She wasn’t supposed to play the horn in her room, not after ten o’clock. But it gave me some relief to picture her, oblivious to all the worry in this room, working through her music so diligently, those same three notes: one two three, one two three, one two three.
For some time, maybe minutes, maybe hours, I lay awake, eyes open, staring up into the darkness. Just two nights earlier, I’d ignored her calls. I was aware of everything shifting, new regret a sharp pain in my throat. The hurt felt real, and truly physical, and also, strangely, like something necessary and right. When I was young, lying in bed at night, the backs of my calves would hurt so much that I would sometimes cry out. Growing pains, my parents said. They were a myth, the doctor countered. But night after night, my legs hurt; until one night, they stopped hurting, and I was taller.
11
SHE GOT UP EARLY to take Bowzer out. She did not get dressed to do this—she only threw her coat back over the clothes she’d slept in and pulled her boots back over my pink socks. Her hair was messy, curls everywhere, but she didn’t bother with a comb.