The House My Daughter Never Sold

The Cabin Harvey Built

In the spring of 2007, Harvey decided he wanted to build a small cabin down at the water’s edge and rent it out to the bass fishermen who came through every summer chasing the tournament trail. Lake Guntersville draws them from three states some weekends, men willing to pay real money for a bed within walking distance of a dock.

The county would not let him do it the easy way. A second dwelling on the property, rented out to the public, needed its own septic permit and its own recorded parcel, separate from the house, so the health department could inspect it on its own terms. Harvey grumbled about the cost of a fresh survey for weeks, but he paid for it, and that August a surveyor drove two new pins into the ground and split our two acres into two pieces of paper at the courthouse. Parcel one carried the house, up on the rise, solely in my name after Harvey passed, the way our whole property had always been. Parcel two carried the cabin and about sixty feet of shoreline around it, its own tax bill, its own legal description, its own little rectangle on the county plat map.

They still shared one gravel driveway. They still shared one mailbox at the road with 9 Blackberry Cove Road painted on the side. To anyone standing in the yard, it looked like one piece of land the way it always had. On paper, at the recorder’s office, it had not been one piece of land in nineteen years.

I did not think about that split more than twice a year, usually when the tax bills came in two separate envelopes instead of one. It was a boring fact about a piece of paperwork, the kind of thing a person forgets she even knows.

After Harvey

Harvey died on a Tuesday morning in his own kitchen, coffee still warm in the cup, gone before the ambulance made it up our gravel drive. I was sixty two. I did not sell the place and move into town the way some of the women at church quietly suggested I should. I stayed, because that house and that dock and that cabin down by the water were the last conversation Harvey and I ever finished together, and I was not interested in anyone telling me it was time to be done with it.

I kept renting the cabin out summers, same as we always had, mostly to returning fishermen who knew me by name and left a card at Christmas. The income was not much, maybe eleven thousand dollars in a good season, but it covered my property taxes on both parcels and then some, and it kept me talking to people instead of just the four walls of an empty house.

I filled the rest of my calendar the way most widows in Bellwood do. I helped run the potluck table the third Sunday of every month at church, the one with the good banana pudding, and I kept a standing seat at the VFW hall on Friday nights during football season, where Harvey used to play dominoes with three men who are all gone now too. I still drove into town every other Saturday for feed and fertilizer, even with no garden left worth the trouble, mostly because the man behind the counter always asked after Alicia by name and I liked pretending, for the length of that conversation, that she still asked after me the same way.

Alicia visited less as the years went on. She had moved to Huntsville after college, married Elmo, built a life with enough traffic and enough deadlines that Bellwood must have started to feel small to her. I told myself that was ordinary. A mother can survive a long time on the word ordinary.