A Grandmother With Her Own Door

“Well,” I said, “then I’d have company.”

Now, I know what some of you are thinking, because my friend Brenda from church said it to my face later. Why didn’t you just tell her no? Why didn’t you say, Michelle, I am your mother and I will not be charged admission?

I could have. I had the words right there behind my teeth.

But a no at your daughter’s kitchen table turns into a fight, and a fight turns into things said that can’t be swept back up. I have one child. I had already buried my husband. I was not going to risk the only other person on this earth who remembers Dale’s voice over a sheet of notebook paper.

So I said, “Thank you, honey. That’s a real offer and I can see you two worked on it. Let me think on it.”

Michelle let out a breath. “Okay. But, Mom, you’ve got to be out of the farmhouse by the first, so.”

“I know when I have to be out.”

I folded Todd’s paper in half and in half again and put it in my purse, in the pocket where I keep my checkbook. Todd watched me do it. He didn’t say anything. Something moved across his face that I couldn’t read then, and I’ll tell you later what it was.

Then I went out to my Buick and sat in it for a minute with both hands on the wheel.

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I should tell you about the farmhouse, so you understand why I couldn’t simply stay put.

Dale was a hired man. I say that with my chin up. He worked for Jim Olson south of town for thirty-one years, and for thirty-one years we lived in the hired man’s house on the Olson place, a square white two-story with a bad north wind and the best garden dirt I ever put a spade in. The house went with the job. We never paid rent on it and we never owned a board of it. That was the arrangement, and it was a fair one, and it’s how a good many people out here have raised a family.

Dale died two years ago in March. He was greasing the planter in the machine shed and he sat down on an overturned bucket to rest, and that was all. Jim found him. Jim Olson cried harder at that funeral than I did, because I had not started yet.

The house went with Dale’s job, so by rights I should have been out of it the spring he died. The Olsons let me stay on anyway. Two years and seven months, and they never once brought it up. Jim’s wife sent over sweet corn. Jim plowed my lane in the winter.

But their boy was coming home to farm. He and his wife had a baby and another on the way, they’d been renting in Kearney, and the hired man’s house was the only place on the farm to put them. Jim came to my door in August with his cap in his hands, and it took him ten minutes to get it said.

“You take until November, Judy. You take longer if you need it.”

“I won’t need longer,” I told him. “That house was always yours, Jim. You’ve been good to me past what anybody could ask.”

So that was that. Nobody was the villain in it. A young family needed a house, and I was a widow living alone in five rooms that belonged to somebody else.