The For Sale Sign In My Yard
That was it. Not what do you want me to do about it, not are you sure, not some speech about rights or fairness. What do you need. That is the kind of man Dale Oster is, and it is the kind of man my father was too, and it is the kind of man my husband was, and I will say here plainly, because it matters to the story, that there was no man in my life failing to speak up in this. There was no husband standing quiet in the corner. Mark was four years in his grave and the men who were left to me were my neighbors, and they did not fail me for one single hour.
“I need you to come by Saturday,” I said. “Rick Satterfield’s bringing somebody out to look at it, ten o’clock. I’m not asking anybody to make trouble. I just don’t want to be standing in that yard alone when strangers walk through my mother’s kitchen deciding whether they like the countertops.”
“We’ll be there,” Dale said. “What time did you say.”
By Friday night I had called every working phone number on our road, eleven households between the county line and the bridge, and I told every one of them the same thing. Not a protest. Not a confrontation. Just, if you’ve got a minute Saturday morning, I’d be glad of the company. I did not have to explain much more than that. Most of them had already heard, the way news travels on a gravel road faster than any phone tree, through the feed store and the church parking lot and Ruthie’s sister who cuts hair out of her garage.
Carol Petersen, who lives three houses down with her husband Gene, told me she’d bring something. LeRoy Krantz, ninety one years old and still driving his own truck to church every Sunday, said only, “Tell me when,” in the short way men of his generation say everything that matters. Jeff and Brenda Combs, the young couple who’d bought the old Simmons dairy two years back and were still learning which of their new neighbors to trust, said they’d come by too, a little shy about it, the way new people are, but they came.
Saturday morning I was up at five the way I am every morning, chores first, the cattle fed and the hens let out, and then I made coffee, a full pot and then another full pot, because I had a feeling I was going to need it.
Dale pulled into my lane at nine forty, a full twenty minutes early, in his work truck, and climbed out saying he needed to borrow a ratchet strap he was fairly sure I did not actually own, which told me plainly enough that borrowing anything was not the point of the visit.
Carol Petersen arrived at nine fifty with a coffee cake still warm from her oven, wrapped in a dish towel, and set it on my porch rail like she’d been planning to bring it over anyway, which we both knew was not true, and neither of us said so.