The Villa My Father Gave Away

Sid finished it. He did it carefully, the way he does everything, so that no one could say afterward that it had been done in anger. He turned to my father and my stepmother and read each of them a formal criminal trespass warning, from a card in his pocket, in a voice that carried to the kitchen. He said the owner had withdrawn all permission and had asked that they leave tonight. He said that if either of them set foot on this property again without the owner’s written invitation, he would arrest them himself, and that he took no pleasure in saying so.

“Sid,” my father said. “You’ve known me forty years.”

“Yes, I have,” said Sid. “And I carried Perry’s casket up that hill. I know what this house is.”

“Leah,” he said. “Please. Not in front of the church.”

“You invited the church, Dad,” I said. “I just came to my own party.”

Colleen was crying for real now. She put her hand on his arm and he did not seem to feel it. She said, so softly that I almost missed it, “I told you to ask her first.”

“Be quiet, Colleen.”

“I told you.”

“Be quiet.”

The VFW commander turned and walked out without a word. The others followed him, one at a time, and the last of them, a bent old man who had taught me to throw a baseball when I was seven, stopped at the door and gave me a slow, stiff salute. I returned it. It was the only moment that night I came close to crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have called you before I agreed to come.”

“You didn’t know,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But I should have asked.”

I went upstairs myself to the boys’ room, because I did not want them to hear any of it from anyone else. They were seven and five, in pajamas with trucks on them, watching a movie on a tablet, and the little one looked up at me in my uniform with enormous eyes and asked if I was a policeman. I told him I was his aunt and that the party was over and that his daddy was going to take them somewhere new. I helped him put his shoes on. Terry took them out the side door so they would not have to walk through the house, and he held my eyes for one second as he went.

“I’ll be at Birch Lane,” he said. “If the offer’s still open.”

“Call Jodi,” I said. “Tonight.”

I stood alone in my living room. The speaker had finally been unplugged. The lanterns in the oak were swaying. The yellow curtains still hung in the kitchen window.

Then I heard something on the front walk, and I went to the door.

Terry had come back. He was standing at the curb in the dark with his hands on the back of the green leather chair, the one with the cracked left arm. He had pulled it up out of the weeds where it had sat for a week, and he had dusted it off with his own shirt. He was breathing hard.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not mine to carry. But I wasn’t going to leave it there.”

I took one arm and he took the other, and together we carried Perry’s chair back up the front steps, across the tile, and into the library, where we set it down under the window. I peeled the strip of masking tape off the door frame myself. BOYS ROOM, it said, in tidy capital letters. I folded it into a small square and put it in my pocket with the compass.

“Thank you,” I said.