The Miller Place on the Courthouse Steps

There was a night in May when I sat down on an overturned bucket in what would be the kitchen, just to rest my feet, and I woke up an hour later with my cheek against the wall and Nate’s work jacket over my shoulders. He had not woken me. He was up on the ladder six feet away, working with the headlamp turned down low.

The county inspector came out the first week of June. He was a quiet man named Larry who went through the whole house with a flashlight and did not say ten words. At the end he signed the card and stuck it in the front window.

“Who did you say did this?” he asked Nate.

“I did.”

“Hm,” Larry said. “You want a job?”

The power company set the meter that Friday. Nate threw the main, and I stood in the kitchen and flipped a switch, and one bare bulb came on over the place where a table ought to go.

That was the same week the phone rang at my desk at the hospital.

“Emily. This is Opal.”

Nate’s grandmother was eighty-eight years old. She lived in the senior apartments behind the Methodist church, did her own wash, and read the county paper front to back with a magnifying glass, legal notices included. I had always been a little afraid of her. She was a small upright woman who did not chatter.

“Opal, is everything all right?”

“The paper finally printed the trustee’s sales,” she said. “It says Schafer, Nathan and Emily, bought a house and two and three-tenths acres on the north road.” A pause. “Is that the Miller place?”

I looked around the billing office as if somebody might hear. “Yes, ma’am. We haven’t told anyone yet. We wanted to get it fit to see.”

She did not say anything for so long I thought the line had dropped.

“Come get me Sunday after church,” she said. “And don’t tell Ronald.”

“Opal, it’s not safe yet. The porch is bad, and there’s plaster down.”

“I have walked on worse,” she said, and hung up.

So that Sunday I pulled up at the church at a quarter past eleven, and Opal came down the walk in her navy dress and her good shoes, with her pocketbook over her wrist, and let me help her up into the truck.

She did not say one word the whole way out. Six miles. She held that pocketbook in her lap with both hands and looked straight out the windshield.

When I turned in at the lane she made a small sound, and I thought it was the ruts.

Nate was waiting in the yard. He had cut the weeds back and laid two planks over the worst of the porch. He came to help her and she lifted her hand.

“I can manage steps, Nathan.”

She would not take my arm either. She went up those planks with her hand on the post, slow, and she went through the front door, and here is the thing I noticed and could not account for. She did not look around the way a visitor looks around. She walked straight through the front room and turned left and then right, through a doorway we had not even hung a door on, as though her feet knew where the kitchen was.

She stopped in the middle of it, under the bare bulb.

She looked at the window over the place where the sink had been. She looked at the door to the little room off the kitchen, the one we had been calling the back bedroom. Then she went to the pantry and put her hand flat on the door frame, on the inside, where the old varnish was nearly black.