The Dollar Farmhouse and the Upstairs

Twenty years

What my parents sold me was a hundred-year-old house that needed everything.

The first winter, Dale and I wore stocking caps to bed. The old oil furnace ran day and night and the upstairs never got above fifty-five. We closed off the three upstairs bedrooms and lived in the downstairs like a couple of old bachelors.

In 2009 an electrician from Sheldon came out to look at a light switch that buzzed. He went down the basement, looked at the ceiling, and came back up the stairs white as flour.

“You’ve got knob-and-tube in here,” he said. “Some of it’s been spliced into with lamp cord. I wouldn’t sleep in this house tonight.”

Rewiring the whole house cost us $11,500. We put it on a home equity loan and paid it off over five years.

In 2011 the hail took the roof. Insurance covered part of it. We paid $14,000 out of our own pocket for a new roof, decking and all, because the old boards underneath were rotten clear through.

In 2014 the oil furnace quit for good on the coldest night of January. We put in a propane furnace and new ductwork for $7,800. Dale says it is the best money he ever spent, and he says it every winter.

Then came the well pump, the septic, the windows on the north side, the front porch floor, the water heater twice.

I am a rural mail carrier. I keep track of things. That is the whole job. I kept every receipt from that house in a spiral notebook in the hutch drawer, and I added it up every January when the propane bill came.

By that March night at the kitchen table, it came to $60,340. That is not counting what Dale and I did ourselves. Every wall I patched. Every window I reglazed. Every Saturday Dale spent under that porch with a jack.

Asking to my face

So I sat there with my coffee going cold, and I looked at my mother.

She is seventy-four. She has a bad hip and a good heart, and she has been rescuing my little brother since the day he was born.

When Jeff broke his arm on the trampoline, Mom drove him to Sioux City in her nightgown. When he wrecked his first car, Dad paid the deductible. When he and Amber couldn’t make rent, Mom slipped him checks I was not supposed to know about.

None of that ever made me angry. Jeff was the baby. That is what you do with the baby.

But this was my house. I could feel Dale’s eyes on me down the table. I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it too. Twenty years of propane bills and stocking caps. Twenty years of Saturdays.

Then under the table, Dale’s hand found my knee and squeezed it once. That was Dale telling me it was my family and my call, and that whatever I said, he was standing behind it.

I looked at Mom. I looked at Dad, who still had not looked up from his cap.

“Thank you,” I said. Mom blinked.

“Thank you for asking me to my face,” I said. “You could have sent Jeff out here to ask. You could have written it in a letter. You came yourselves, and you sat at my table, and you said it out loud. That took something. I know it did.”

Mom’s mouth opened a little and closed again. She had come for a fight or a yes. She had her whole speech ready for either one. She did not have anything ready for thank you.

“I’ll give you an answer Saturday,” I said. Dad finally looked up. His eyes were wet. “Tammy,” he said, and then he didn’t say anything else.

They left a few minutes later. I watched their taillights go down the gravel toward the blacktop until the cedars swallowed them.