The Debt Gordon Left Sara’s Son

The Last Saturday

Gordon started slowing down that final winter. Nothing dramatic, nothing either of us thought to worry about out loud. He sat down more between tasks. He let Greg finish jobs he used to insist on finishing himself. By spring, he was mostly sitting in the folding chair under the maple tree while Greg mowed, instead of standing at the porch rail the way he always had.

The last Saturday, Greg told me, was a good one. Gordon was in decent spirits, told a story about a truck he’d once fixed on the side of the interstate in a snowstorm, laughed at his own punchline before Greg could get there. They sat under the maple tree afterward with their sweet tea until the light started to go gold, and when Greg got up to leave, Gordon said something my son didn’t think twice about at the time.

“You’ve been a good one to have around,” Gordon told him. “Don’t forget how to be that, when I’m not across the road to remind you.”

Greg told him not to talk that way. Gordon just smiled and told him to get on home before his mother worried.

Two days later, Gordon Hausner died in his sleep. He was eighty one years old. The county coroner said his heart had simply stopped sometime in the early morning, quiet, the same way he’d lived the last several years of his life.

I found out because a deputy came to our door that morning and asked, straight off, “Are you Dianne?” before he’d even introduced himself. The only address the county had on file besides Gordon’s own was ours, because Gordon had listed us, four years earlier, as the people to call if anything ever happened and nobody answered his door.

Greg did not cry in front of me. He went out to the garage that used to be his second home, sat in it alone for close to an hour, and came back inside with dry eyes and a face I did not recognize on my own son.