The Padlock On My Own Door
The Padlock on My Own Front Door
The farmhouse came into view at the end of our gravel drive the way it always has, white clapboard gone a little gray at the corners, the porch my grandfather built the summer before he died, the hay barn behind it that has stood on that ground since before my father was born.
It is my grandmother’s house. She raised her family in it, ran the roadside stand out front for forty years selling sweet corn and eggs and whatever the garden gave up that week, and when her heart started failing three years ago, I was the one who moved back in to take care of her.
I gave up my apartment in the county seat to do it. I gave up a lot of small things that year, a relationship that didn’t survive the distance, a promotion I could have taken at the elevator’s main office, evenings that belonged to someone my own age instead of a woman who needed help getting to the bathroom by the end. I do not regret one day of it. She was the person who taught me how to can tomatoes and how to tell a good cutting horse from a nervous one, and I would have given up a great deal more than an apartment to sit with her those last months.
She passed a year and a half before that wreck on County Road 9. I stayed on in the house afterward because it never occurred to me not to, because it was the only home I had ever really known, and because, if I am honest, some part of me believed my grandmother had made her wishes about that house clear enough that nobody would ever need to argue about it.
My key would not turn in the lock.
I stood on the porch in the same clothes I had worn into the emergency room four days earlier, wrist in a brace, working the key back and forth the way you do when you refuse to believe what your own hands are telling you, before I finally looked down and saw it.
A padlock hung where the deadbolt used to be, bright and new against the old brass. A note was folded underneath it, my father’s handwriting, blunt and slanted the way it always is when he is angry and trying not to show it.
Talk to Alex before you touch anything in this house.