The House My Son Wanted Signed Over

The Red Door

Jo did not take me home afterward. She got on State Road 13 and pointed the car north.

“Where are we going?”

“To look at something. Hush.”

Lake Wawasee in March is not much to look at. The water is the color of a nickel, and the piers are all pulled up and stacked in the yards like lumber. Jo drove past her own place and stopped four doors down, in front of a cottage with a For Sale sign leaning in the mud.

It was white, with a red door that needed paint. One bedroom. A kitchen you could stand in the middle of and touch the stove and the sink without moving your feet. A screened porch across the whole back, and beyond the porch, forty feet of grass, and then the lake.

“It’s been sitting since October,” Jo said. “Too small for the summer people. They all want four bedrooms and a bar.”

I stood on that screened porch for a long time.

“There’s no room in it for anybody but me,” I said.

“That’s what I like about it,” said Jo.

“Could I get a piano in here?”

“We’ll take the door off the hinges.”

I bought it for a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars.

On the way home Jo was quiet until we passed the grain elevator at Milford.

“You’re really going to give that boy six months.”

“I am.”

“He doesn’t deserve six minutes.”

“It isn’t for him, Jo. It’s so I can live with it after.”

What Maple Street Knew

I had worried about how to keep a secret on Maple Street. I need not have. I did not have to keep it. The street kept it for me.

I only ever told Jo and Linda. But Amy told her mother, I think, and her mother was in Linda’s Sunday school class, and that was that. By the middle of April I could feel it. Nobody said a thing to me. It was in how they waved.

By May, my son was the only person on Maple Street who did not know whose house he was sleeping in. Stephanie did not know either, but Stephanie never counted herself as living on our street. She called it “this neighborhood,” like a motel she was passing through.

Dale, who has carried our mail for twenty-two years and coached Brad in Little League, started walking my letters around to the den window instead of putting them in the box. He would tap on the glass and hand them through.

“Figured you’d want to see these first,” was all he ever said.

Linda quit calling ahead. She came on Thursday mornings, when Stephanie was at the salon and Brad was at work, and she did not bring coffee cake anymore. She brought empty boxes from the Kroger, folded flat, under her arm.

Because that was the other thing I did all summer. I moved.