The Dollar Farmhouse and the Upstairs

What Dale said

Dale didn’t say a word until we were in bed. The wind was coming out of the northwest, the way it does in March, rattling the storm windows we hadn’t taken down yet. Dale lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“It’s your folks,” he said. “And it’s your brother. I’m not going to tell you what to do about your own family.” He turned his head on the pillow. “But it’s my house too, Tam. I put my back into it. I want you to know I’m not giving it up quiet.”

“I know.”

“Whatever you decide, I’m with you. I just want you to know where I stand.”

That is the most Dale has said in one breath since he proposed.

I lay awake a long time after he started snoring. I thought about Cole wetting the bed on an air mattress next to a chest freezer. I thought about Kenzie crying in my parents’ bathroom with the fan running so her daddy wouldn’t hear.

And I thought about this house. The roof. The wires. The notebook in the hutch.

Here is what I knew by two in the morning. I was not going to let my brother’s three kids go one more month without a real roof over them. And I was not going to sign over the house Dale and I had rebuilt with our own hands.

Both of those things were true. I just had to find the door between them.

Around three, I found it. It was right over my head.