The House My Son Wanted Signed Over

“Brad, for what it’s worth. Nobody’s putting anybody on the curb. Marilyn asked us to give you and your wife through the end of October, and we said yes before she finished asking. That’s five weeks. If you need help loading a truck, I’ve got one.”

“Why would you do that?” Brad said. He sounded about twelve.

“Because she asked,” Mark said. “And because she’s your mother, and she still wanted to make sure you had someplace to sleep.”

Stephanie turned and went into the house. I heard her on the stairs, fast, and then a door. The bedroom door. I had heard it close a good many times, and that was the last.

I walked over to the swing. It took me a minute. I did not sit.

He looked up at me. His eyes were wet. I had not seen that since his father’s funeral.

“Where are you even going?”

“Home.”

“Mom, the bed. They’re holding the bed till noon.”

“Then you’d better call them, honey, and say thank you, and tell them to give it to somebody who needs one.”

Jo tapped the horn. Just once, and not hard.

“I did ask you to carry my suitcase out,” I said.

And he did. I will give him that. He stood up off that swing and carried his father’s Samsonite down the steps and down the walk, past the pie and the casserole and the mailman and the preacher, and he set it in the trunk of Jo’s Ford and shut the lid.

Jo looked at him through the open window for a good long while.

“Bradley,” she said.

“Miss Jo.”

“I drove you to school for six years. You threw up on my bus twice, and I cleaned it up, and I never told a soul.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’d think about that,” Jo said, and rolled up the window.

I got in. Amy leaned down and set the pie in my lap, still warm through the tin.

“Keep the ceiling blue,” I told her.

“Every year,” she said.

I did not look back at the house. I had been looking at it for forty-seven years, and I knew it by heart.

Thirty-Two Boards

It took the door off its hinges, and five men, and some language Pastor Jim pretended not to hear, but by three o’clock that afternoon there was a Baldwin spinet on a screened porch on Lake Wawasee.

It was out of tune from the ride. I played it anyway, and Linda sang, and the Yoder boys stood in my little yard with their caps off, eating sugar cream pie with their fingers.

By suppertime everybody had gone home but Jo.

We carried two lawn chairs out to the end of the dock. There are thirty-two boards in that dock. I had counted them in April. The lake had gone flat and gold, and somebody across the water was burning leaves.

“Well,” Jo said. “You saw his face.”

“I did.”

“Was it worth six months?”

I thought about it honestly.

“No,” I said. “I thought it would be. It wasn’t anything I wanted to see. But I’d have wondered the rest of my life whether he would really do it, and now I don’t have to wonder.”

She handed me half of her afghan to put over my knees, and we sat there until the bugs ran us in.

There is one more thing, and then I am done.

I told you I took forty-one boxes out of that house. I took everything that was mine. But I left one thing behind on purpose, where I knew Brad would find it and Stephanie never would, because in two years Stephanie had never once opened that pantry to cook.