The Lease My Son Typed Himself

The night before they let me go, I called him to say I was coming home early. It rang through to his voicemail. I left a message. I told him Mavis would drive me, and that he did not need to take off work, but that I would love to see him at supper.

He did not call back.

So it was Mavis who drove me the thirty miles home on the last Thursday of August, with the corn standing tall and starting to yellow at the edges on both sides of the highway. She talked the whole way about a woman at her church who had the same thing I had and was still doing her own yard work at eighty-one. I looked out the window and thought about my own bed.

We turned onto my street a little after two in the afternoon. I have lived in that house since 1984. It is a plain white two-story, four blocks down the hill from the college, with a porch across the front and a maple that Dale planted the year Troy was born. Dale was my husband. He died six years ago this past March, and I moved my bed down into the old den the winter after, because my knee did not care for the stairs and because the upstairs was too quiet.

There was a pickup in my driveway.

It was a little Ford Ranger, older, dark green, with a steel toolbox across the bed and a college parking tag hanging from the mirror of the small gray car parked behind it.

“Did Troy get a different truck?” Mavis asked.

“That is not Troy’s,” I said.

She parked at the curb. She came around and got my elbow, and I let her, which will tell you how I felt. We went up the walk. I put my foot on the bottom porch step and stopped.

The step did not move.

That step had wobbled since before Dale died. He had meant to fix it, and then he was sick, and then he was gone, and for six years I had stepped over it or stepped on the left side of it and told every guest and meter reader to mind it. I had asked Troy about it more than once. He always said he would get to it.

Now it sat there solid as a church pew. Somebody had replaced the tread with a new board, and set it with screws, not nails, and the cut ends were sealed.

“Wanda?” Mavis said.

“Somebody fixed my step,” I said.

The front door was unlocked. Inside, on the rubber mat where I keep my garden clogs, were four pairs of shoes that did not belong to me. A pair of steel-toed work boots, gray with dust. A pair of men’s sneakers. A pair of white nursing shoes. A pair of flip-flops with daisies on them.

The house smelled like somebody else’s supper. Onions, and something with cumin in it.

Biscuit came down the stairs, taking his time, and I will tell you he had never looked better. His coat was brushed. He wound once around my ankles and then went and sat by his dish, which was full.

Mavis set my hospital bag down on the hall floor very quietly.

“Wanda,” she whispered, “somebody is living in your house.”

I took my phone out of my purse and called Troy. It rang six times and went to his voicemail. I called again. The same.