**Part 1**
My son charged me rent to sleep in his guest room. Eight months later, he was on my porch with two suitcases. His wife’s mother had lived in that same room for five months, free. “Our closing got pushed back, Mom. We’re moving in,” he said.
My name is Carla. I’m seventy-seven, and I sewed for a living for forty-one years. I hemmed prom dresses, wedding gowns, and every Halloween costume Seth ever wore. I made him a cowboy, a pirate, a hot dog, and one year, a whole John Deere tractor. When he got married, I tailored his suit for nothing and cried while I pinned the sleeves.
My husband had been gone three years when I sold the farm outside Seward. I couldn’t keep up the place by myself, and I bought a little two-bedroom house in town. It was brand new, with a porch I picked out myself. The builder said it would be done by Christmas. It wasn’t.
Seth lived in Aurora, about an hour west. He called and said, “Mom, come stay with us till your house is ready.” I was grateful enough to nearly cry. I packed two suitcases and my sewing machine and went to stay in his guest room.
The first night, Seth walked me down the hall with a little pad of paper in his hand. His insurance office had free pads with his name printed across the top.
“So, four-fifty a month,” he said. “Keeps things fair. It’s what we’d charge anybody.”
I thought he was teasing me. He wasn’t. He tore off a receipt and put it on the dresser.
I was proud, and I didn’t ask people for money. So I wrote him a check for $450. Then I sat on the edge of that bed and cried with the TV turned up so nobody would hear me.
I paid him every month, four checks in all. I cooked supper most nights and mended clothes for his family for free, out of habit. On the first of each month, another little receipt appeared on the dresser. I put every one in my sewing box. I can’t give you a grand reason. I just did.
In February, I went to my grandkids’ choir concert at the high school. I sat beside Gaylene, Seth’s wife’s mother. She lived in a little one-bedroom senior apartment over in York, and before that night I had only seen her at birthdays.
At intermission, she leaned over with her bag of popcorn.
“So how do you like my old room?” she asked.
I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“After my knee surgery,” she said. “I was in there five months. Seth wouldn’t let me lift a finger.”
“How much did he charge you?”
She laughed like I’d told a joke. “Charge me? Honey, not one dime.”
Then she saw my face and stopped laughing.
“Carla,” she said quietly. “He’s charging you?”
I told her about the $450 and the receipts. She put the popcorn down and didn’t pick it back up. I felt embarrassed, which is a strange way to feel when someone else has treated you unfairly, but there it was.
After the concert, Gaylene walked me to my car in the cold and hugged me hard.
“That’s not right,” she said. “And I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”
I hadn’t told her. I hadn’t told anybody. That was partly pride and partly the fact that I didn’t want to hear myself say it out loud.
Gaylene and I started having coffee every Tuesday at the bakery halfway between York and Seward. She’s a hoot. She calls Seth “the landlord” now, though she never used that name in front of him.
My house was finally done in March, and I moved out of Seth’s guest room. I left the last receipt on the dresser, paid. I never said a word to him about the rent. Not one.
I got my porch, my little kitchen, Wheel of Fortune at seven, and the quiet I had been waiting for. In the mornings, I drank coffee at the kitchen table and watched the sun come through the window. I didn’t think much about that guest room again for a long time.
