The father of Amanda is a retired postal carrier named Stan Dombrowski, and he read the deed the way he once read addresses, with his glasses low on his nose and his lips moving. He sat on the arm of the sofa in the living room of Josh. When he had finished he took off the glasses and held them. “Grand River Properties, LLC,” he said. “Managing member, Bettina Kovach. Mrs. Kovach, you own this house.” The room was quite silent. On the television a basketball game played with the sound off, and a man in a red uniform sank a shot to no applause at all.
Josh sat in the armchair across from me. My son is forty four, a broad, balding man in a Michigan State sweatshirt, who owns a landscaping truck and a laugh he uses to fill the quiet. He did not laugh now. “Mom, I thought the landlord was selling. Amanda and I got a letter in the spring. I never saw the name of the company.” “I know,” I said. “I wanted to see what you would say when you thought you owed a stranger.” I took the folded paper from my purse. “Orlando. Week 24, Unit 806. Sold in March for eighteen thousand dollars.”
“You signed my name to the sale, Josh, on a power of attorney I gave you for my medicine bills. After the fees the check was sixteen thousand, two hundred and forty dollars, and it went into an account ending in 7709, which is yours. You told me the resort had taken it back for unpaid dues.” I folded the paper smaller. “Your father and I bought that week in 1997. We took you there when you were eleven. You went down the water slide forty times and came out every time with your hair standing straight up.”
A scrap of Orlando timeshare paper lay in a purse at a Sunday dinner and gave one auto parts owner the evening to bring her son back to her table.
Amanda, who is thirty eight and teaches music in a middle school, with a clear, steady voice, had been sitting at the end of the sofa with her knees together. “Josh, the money for the new furnace,” she said. “You said it was from the overtime.” Josh put his head in his hands. “I was in trouble, Mandy. The truck. A man I owed. I was going to tell you.” Stan Dombrowski folded the deed in thirds and handed it back to me. “Mrs. Kovach, I am sorry,” he said. “This is a hard thing to sit in a room with.”
I told Josh that I had been angry for about a week. “Then I thought about your father,” I said. “Ed would have taken you out to the garage, and handed you a wrench, and said, now fix it.” He lifted his head. His eyes were red. “So here is the wrench. The money comes back, every dollar of the eighteen thousand, because the week was not yours to sell. It comes back in payments, and each one comes to me in person, on a Sunday, at my table.”
“The house is yours to buy,” I went on, “at what I paid, when the money is repaid. Until then you pay me rent, like any tenant, in writing. Fair rent. Six hundred dollars.” “Six hundred?” he said. “That is less than the mortgage was.” “It is less than the mortgage was, because I am your mother,” I said. “It is not nothing, because I am your landlord.” Amanda laughed in spite of herself, a wet little laugh, and put her hand to her mouth. “Mrs. Kovach,” she said, “I think I like you.”
“Mom, why did you buy it?” Josh asked. “Because the bank was about to take it,” I said. “Because you were three months behind, and you never told anyone. I called a man at the bank. He told me.” I did not say it with any pleasure. “I wanted to put a floor under you without taking the house from you. And I did not know how to do it without you knowing I knew.” He sat very still. “You could have just told me,” he said. “So could you,” I answered. We looked at each other, and for a moment neither of us had a thing to say.
Josh got up, crossed the room in two strides, and got down on one knee beside my chair and put his arms around my waist, a heavy man in a sweatshirt, crying into my cardigan. I stroked the back of his bald head, which I had not done since he was ten. Stan Dombrowski excused himself politely to the kitchen to refill the coffee for everybody. When he came back, I saw that his own eyes were red.
Josh paid every Sunday for two years and two months. He brought the check, in an envelope, with a gas station pastry that he had learned I liked, and he sat at my table. We talked, at first, about money, and then about the truck, and then about nothing. He got rid of the man he owed. He took on a second landscaping crew. He and Amanda were married in my backyard in June, under the maple, and Stan Dombrowski walked her across the grass, whistling.
On the last Sunday, I gave him a small box. In it was a key on a ring, with a plastic palm tree. “I bought the week back in April,” I said. “It cost me twenty thousand dollars. Do not look like that. I have six million.” He turned the key over in his fingers. “The week belongs to you and Amanda now, and to any children you have.” I held the palm tree up to the window and it caught the light. “Eleven years old,” I said. “Forty times down the slide.” Josh grinned, wet faced. “Mom,” he said, “I am going to go down it fifty.”
