The House My Son Wanted Signed Over

The Girl With The Shovel

It snowed four inches that night.

At a quarter to seven the next morning I heard the scrape of a shovel on my front walk, same as every snow for three winters. I put my coat on over my robe and went out on the porch.

It was Amy, from next door. She and her husband Mark rented the little white house with the green shutters. She was twenty-eight and taught second grade at my school, in a room down the hall from the office I used to run. Mark was a lineman for the electric co-op. They had a baby coming in the summer, though I did not know that yet.

“Mrs. Decker, get back inside,” Amy called. “It’s eleven degrees.”

“Come up here a minute.”

She came up the steps, pink in the face, stomping her boots.

“Are you two still looking for a house?”

She laughed, and it came out as a cloud. “We’re always looking. Everything in Corbin sells to somebody from Fort Wayne with cash before we can get our shoes on.”

“What do you think of this one?”

She looked up at the porch ceiling, the way people do. Walt painted it sky blue the summer Brad was born.

“I think it’s the prettiest house on the street. I tell Mark that every time we pull in.”

“Would you want it?”

She stopped stomping.

“Mrs. Decker.”

“Marilyn. If you’re going to buy my house, you’d better call me Marilyn.”

I told her what I had heard on the stairs. I watched her face go from pink to white.

“He said that? About his own mother?”

“He did.”

“What do you need us to do?”

That was the first thing out of her mouth. Not what the price was. What did I need.

Mark came over after his shift, and the three of us sat in their kitchen, because I could not sit in mine. I named a number. It was a fair number, two hundred and twelve thousand dollars, which was less than a stranger from Fort Wayne would have paid, and a good deal more than nothing, which is what I was set to get.

“I’ve got three conditions,” I told them. “One. I stay through the summer. I want one more season with my peonies, and I need the time to get settled somewhere. Two. You keep the porch ceiling blue.”

“Done,” Amy said. “And three?”

“Three is you don’t say a word to my son.”

Amy reached over and put her hand on mine. “Marilyn, why not just tell him? Tell him you know, tell him it’s sold, and have it done with?”

It was a fair thing to ask, and I had been up all night with it.

“Because he hasn’t done it yet,” I said. “He’s only said it. A person can say an ugly thing in the dark at eleven at night and wake up ashamed. I’ve done it myself. I’m going to give him the summer. If he changes his mind, if he comes to me even once and says, Mom, what do you want, then I’ll tell him everything, and we’ll sort it out like a family.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I’d like to see his face.”

We signed the papers the last week of March, on a morning Brad thought I was at the foot doctor. Jo drove me. It took forty minutes and a bad pen, and when it was over I did not own a house for the first time since I was twenty-five.

I thought that would feel like falling. It felt like setting down a bag of groceries I had been carrying for two years.