The House I Bought Then Reclaimed

I think about that christening now more than I used to. Ivalou’s father had cornered me by the punch bowl and asked, not unkindly on the surface, whether I had ever thought about moving somewhere with a little more opportunity, somewhere my son’s career might really take off. I told him Bevier had raised three generations of my family and I did not intend to apologize for it to a man who had only lived in the county since building his second feed store. He laughed like I had made a joke. I had not been joking. I understand now that he heard a woman who would never quite know her place at his table, and had simply been waiting for the right season to say so out loud.

That Thanksgiving fell the same week the one year anniversary of the house closing had quietly passed, a date I had circled on my own calendar and never mentioned to anyone. I drove home from the IGA with my half filled cart still sitting in aisle six, and I did not turn on the radio. I let the silence do what silence does, which is make you finally hear the things you have been talking over for years.

At home, I brewed the good tea, the kind I save for occasions I used to think were happy ones, and I pulled out a purple folder I had not opened since the closing. My husband’s old friend, a retired attorney who had done our closing as a favor and would not take a fee, had insisted I let him build in what he called a gratitude clause, a standard protective provision for large family gifts that Missouri law recognizes under certain conditions. At the time I had waved it off as an old man’s excessive caution. I had been too proud, and honestly too happy, to read past the signature line.