The Miller Place on the Courthouse Steps

“I am eighty-eight years old,” she said. “I had made my peace that I would never stand in my mother’s kitchen again. And you two children went and bought it with your own money and told no one.” She looked at me, and then at the tape on my thumbs. “Whose money was it? Not Ronald’s.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Ours. Two years of it.”

“I heard about the envelopes,” Opal said. “I told him at the time what I thought. He said you two did not need it.”

“We didn’t need it,” Nate said quietly. “That’s not the same as not wanting to be thought of.”

Opal nodded, once, the way you would nod at a child who had gotten a hard sum right.

Then she let me bring her the bucket, and she sat down on it in her navy dress in the middle of her mother’s kitchen, and Nate knelt on that filthy floor and put his arms around her, and I went out on the planks and looked at the red clump by the cistern for a while.

It was rhubarb. She told me later. Her mother had set it there in 1931.

Opal told Ron herself. I was not there for it. All I know is what Judy told me afterward, which is that Opal telephoned on Monday morning and said, “Ronald, you will drive me out to my father’s house on Saturday,” and that Ron sat down in the kitchen chair without pulling it out first and nearly missed it.

They came at ten. I watched his truck slow at the lane and stop there on the blacktop for what must have been a full minute before it turned in.

Ron Schafer was sixty-nine then, a big square man, a union carpenter for thirty-eight years. He got out and helped his mother down and then he just stood in the yard. He looked at the cistern and the corner of the porch and a place in the grass by the old machine shed where there was nothing at all to look at.

Judy had come too. She had her hand pressed to her collarbone.

Nate came down off the ladder. “Dad.”

“You bought it,” Ron said. “You bought this place and never said a word to me.”

“We didn’t know what it was. I swear to you. Nobody ever told me.”

“No,” Ron said. “I don’t guess anybody did.”

Opal went in by herself. Judy followed her, and I heard her start to cry in the front room. The three of us stayed in the yard.

Ron looked over the porch like a carpenter, and I could see it pain him. Then he looked at the new meter base and the conduit, plumb as a ruler, and the permit card in the window.

“You do all that?” he asked Nate.

“Nights.”

“And she’s been out at the truck stop. Judy saw her out there once and I told her she had to be mistaken.” He shook his head. “Two years of that. You should have told us you wanted a house. We’d have…” He stopped.

“You’d have what, Dad?” Nate said. He was not angry. He only asked.

And then Ron said it badly. I do not hold it against him now. He had been standing in that yard at five years old, and it was all in his face, and a man in that condition grabs for whatever is nearest.