The Villa My Father Gave Away

I should explain the key. Four years earlier, after Perry’s funeral, when I had to fly back to my duty station and could not bear the thought of an empty house with nobody who could get in if a pipe burst, I had given my father a spare key. I told him it was for emergencies. He had cried a little when I handed it over. I remember thinking, at the time, that it might be the closest the two of us had ever come.

He had used it to walk his other daughter’s family into my home.

I counted, because counting is what I do when a room wants a fight. Eight suitcases on the stairs. Eleven bins. One dumpster. Four adults, two children I could hear thumping around upstairs. A sheet of paper on the piano, which I did not yet understand.

Then Terry came through the front door.

Terry Nolan, thirty-six years old, brown beard, a good man to look at and an easy man to push around. He was backing in through the open door, dragging something heavy across my entryway tile, and it took me a second to see what it was. It was Perry’s reading chair. A broad green leather chair with a cracked left arm that Perry had refinished himself, the chair he sat in every evening of the one winter we lived in that house together, the chair that still smelled like his sawdust and his soap.

He was dragging it toward the dumpster.

“Terry,” I said.

He stopped. He had the grace to look uncomfortable. He looked past me at my father, the way a dog looks at the person with the leash.

“Rex said it didn’t fit with the decor,” Terry said. “He said it could go.”

“Put it by the curb,” my father said. He did not even turn his head. “She won’t be using it.”

I stood in my hallway and listened to the sound of my husband’s chair scraping over the tile, and that is the instant I decided how this was going to go.

My father had never once cared what I thought of him. But he cared, down to the marrow, what the congregation at First Baptist and his brothers at the VFW thought of him. I had known that since I was a child.

“Dad,” I said. “Is that all?”

“What do you mean, is that all.”

“Is there anything else I should know before I go?”

“There’s a little housewarming Saturday,” he said. “At six. Just family and church and a few of the boys. You’re welcome to come, if you can keep it civil.”

“A housewarming.”

“Colleen has the invitations in the front room.”

They were stacked on top of my piano, a cream-colored pile of cardstock with gold embossing, and I picked one up and read it while my father watched me read.

You are invited to celebrate the new home of Mindy and Terry Nolan. The Nolan Family Villa, Greeley Falls. Saturday, six o’clock in the evening. Hosted by Rex Osgood, proud father. Blessing by the pastor. Light supper to follow.

Sixty people. The pastor of the First Baptist Church of Greeley Falls, coming to bless my house. My father’s friends from the VFW post, where he served on the board and had held a chair at the head of the table for fifteen years. Terry’s regional manager from the farm supply company and the manager’s wife, a couple my father had been trying to impress for months. Neighbors. Old classmates. The whole front pew of a certain kind of small Arkansas life.