“I mean exactly what I said, honey,” I told Renee, and I set the red brick down on the kitchen island, where it made a solid, honest sound against the white marble. “You put my house in front of everyone. I am only catching up.” The housewarming party had gone as still as a held breath. Forty guests stood on the deck and in the open living room, holding wine and small plates of something with goat cheese. Renee had let go of my arm as if it had burned her. Mark, her husband, stood with the loan papers in his hand, reading them a second time. The mother of Mark had put her wine glass down on a coaster and drawn herself up in her good cashmere sweater.
“Bernice,” she said, in a clear cultivated voice, “I do not believe we have been properly introduced. I am Margaret Ellis. I am delighted to meet you. I understand you were a woman of some means in West Virginia.” I almost laughed. Delighted! My daughter had been introducing me for six years as the woman who cleaned houses, and here was her mother in law, delighted. I said, “Mrs. Ellis, I ran a brickyard on the Kanawha River for thirty eight years. I sold it in September for nine million, eight hundred thousand dollars.” Someone in the living room dropped a cracker. Renee made a small strangled noise.
“Renee,” Mark said, in a very careful voice, “you told me the down payment came from your inheritance. You said your father left you money.” Renee said, “Mark, I can explain.” He lifted the loan papers. “Seventy two thousand dollars against the house of your mother? Taken out in April?” She said, “It was a temporary loan. I was going to pay it back as soon as the bonus came through.” Mark stared at her. It was the look of a man who has just realized that the floor under his feet is paint on a trap door. He put the papers on the island and walked out onto the deck. The sliding door hissed shut behind him.
A single red brick set on a marble kitchen island brought a daughter back to the clay she once told everyone to forget.
The guests began to leave. They went quietly, murmuring, collecting coats and purses. I stood beside the island and let them go. I did not want to make a spectacle, and for a woman who had said four sentences at a housewarming, I felt that I had made a very large one. When the last car had pulled out of the drive, the three of us were left, Renee and I in the kitchen, Mark in the cold on the deck. The refrigerator hummed. Renee stood with her hands flat on the marble, looking at the brick. After a long time she said, in a whisper, “It has our name on it.”
“It does,” I said. “Kessler Brick. Charleston, West Virginia. Your father stamped every one of them himself, in the early years. He used to say that a brick with your name on it is a promise you make to a house.” Renee touched it with one finger. The red was deep, the surface a little rough. “I used to hate the smell of that place,” she said. “Wet clay and smoke. I used to wake up in the summers and the whole house stank of it. When I went to college, I told everyone my father was in construction. I did not even say bricks.” Her shoulders began to shake. “I am so ashamed of what I said about you.”
I put my arm around her. She was forty three years old, taller than I, with the long jaw of Frank, and she wept against my shoulder like a girl of six. I told her the truth, which is that I had known. I had known all those years. I had heard the careful way she said Mother on the phone, the little pause before she answered a question about home. I had never said a word. I had thought, a child must decide who she wants to be. What I had not known was that a child could grow into someone who would sign away the house of her mother.
I told her what I would do. The deed would be voided, quietly, at the county clerk. She would pay off the home equity loan out of the proceeds of her own savings and a payment plan with the bank, however long it took. And I would not tell Mark what to do about his marriage, because that was not mine to decide. But there was one more condition, and I had been thinking about it for three weeks. “Renee, I want you to come home for a month this summer. To the brickyard. It is not mine anymore, but the new owners have agreed to let you in. You will work.”
“Work?” she said. “Doing what?” I smiled. “Making bricks.” She came in June. She drove down from Columbus on the first Monday, in jeans, with her hair under a cap, and I met her at the gate of the yard at six in the morning. The yard foreman, a gruff man named Cecil, put her at a table with a mold and a bucket of wet clay. Within an hour she had clay to her elbows. She pressed the first brick, tipped it out, and looked at it. It was crooked. She looked at me. I said, “Again.” She pressed another.
By the end of the week, she could make forty in an hour. By the end of the month, she was singing. She had a way of humming under her breath that I recognized from the old days, the way of her father. On the last Friday, Cecil handed her a small metal stamp, the old Kessler stamp, and she pressed it into a fresh brick, hard, and lifted it out. Her hands were steady. She turned it over. Our name stood out in the red clay, sharp and clean. She held it for a long time. Then she said, “Mother, I want to build something with these.”
That fall, she and Mark, who had forgiven her slowly and with great deliberation, built a low garden wall around the yard of their house in Columbus, brick by brick, laid by their own hands on Saturday mornings. Every fortieth brick carried the stamp. On the day it was finished, they invited me to dinner, and led me out to the wall at sunset. Renee stood beside it, her hand on the top course. She said, “Mother, tell everyone what these are.” I looked at the red wall, glowing in the evening light. “They are promises,” I said, “you make to a house.”