The Villa My Father Gave Away

My sister Mindy came out of the kitchen, my kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel with a rooster on it that I had never seen before. She was thirty-four, blonde, soft-spoken in a way that had always worked in her favor, and she wore a smile I knew well, the one she had worn at ten years old whenever our father handed her something that had been mine. She crossed the hall and hugged me. It was a long, warm, practiced hug.

“You’ll get over it,” she whispered into my shoulder. “You always do.”

I stood there with my arms at my sides, and I felt the brass compass in my breast pocket press into my ribs.

Let me tell you about the compass, since it comes back.

My husband Perry bought it for me at a flea market in Hot Springs the weekend I was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. It cost him eleven dollars and about an hour of arguing with a man who insisted it was a real antique, and Perry loved it so much that he gave it to me wrapped in a dish towel, because he had forgotten to buy a box. “So you can always find your way back,” he said, and I rolled my eyes, because that is the kind of thing he said, the kind of thing I teased him for. He taught high school shop at Greeley Falls Consolidated for eleven years. He fixed lawnmowers for widows and never charged them. He died of a brain aneurysm in the produce aisle of the Harp’s on Main Street on a Tuesday in March, four years ago, at thirty-seven years old. By the time I got a call through to the ship’s comms and then a flight home, they had already moved him.

The villa was the thing we were going to do together.

That is what people in Greeley Falls call it. The villa. It is a stucco house with a terracotta tile roof on a bluff over the water, built in 1974 by a man from Dallas who had apparently seen a magazine, and for thirty years it sat there half-rotting while the county pointed at it and laughed. Perry saw it and went quiet the way he did when he fell in love with something. We bought it the year before he died for $186,000, which was almost everything we had, and he spent every weekend and every summer with a pry bar, tearing out rotten lath.

He died before the first wall was plastered.

I finished it. All of it. With my Navy pay, nights and weekends and leave days, and with the insurance money that came after, I rebuilt that house room by room with my own hands and my own checks, and by the time the last window was hung I had put $412,000 into it, every cent from me and Perry, not one dollar from anyone named Osgood. My father had never held a hammer on the property. He had never paid a bill on it. The deed has one name on it, and the name is mine.

And now there was a label maker in the library.

“Your sister needs this,” my father said again, as if I had missed it the first time. “Terry’s sales are down. The boys need a yard. You can come visit. Holidays. We’ll work it out.”

“You’ll work it out.”

“Go back to the Navy, Leah. Do the job you chose.” He lifted my spare key and let it swing from his finger like a pendulum. “Your family is going to live here now.”