The Dollar Farmhouse and the Upstairs

Mom calls

Mom called at four o’clock. I was in the kitchen with my hands in a bowl of hamburger.

“Tammy.” She didn’t even say hello. “Jeff says he is moving into your upstairs.”

“He moved in about noon,” I said. “Kenzie’s picked out a curtain.”

“What on earth are you doing?”

“I’m giving my brother a place to live,” I said. “That’s what you asked me for, isn’t it?”

There was a silence on the line so long I thought the call had dropped.

“That’s not what I asked,” Mom said.

“It’s my answer,” I said. “Come out for Sunday dinner. You and Dad both. I’m making a roast.”

She hung up without saying goodbye. My mother has never in her life hung up without saying goodbye.

I washed the hamburger off my hands and stood at the sink for a while looking out at the windbreak.

The first night

Supper that night was the loudest meal that kitchen had seen in years. Seven of us around a table built for six. Brody ate three sloppy joes and asked for a fourth. Dale gave him his own, and Brody looked at him like he had been handed a twenty-dollar bill.

Hannah sat next to Kenzie. Halfway through supper, without saying anything, Hannah reached over and pulled Kenzie’s hair back out of her face and started to braid it.

Kenzie went completely still. She had a sloppy joe in both hands and she didn’t move.

“Your mom used to do this?” Hannah asked her softly. Kenzie shook her head. “Daddy tries,” she said. “He’s not good at it.”

“I’m not good at it,” Jeff said from across the table. He tried to smile.

“I’ll teach you,” Hannah said to Kenzie. “Then you can do it yourself. Then you can do mine.”

I had to get up and get more napkins from the pantry so nobody would see my face.

Cole asked if the furnace was a monster, because it made a noise when it started up.

“That’s not a monster,” Dale told him. “That’s the best $7,800 I ever spent.”

“What’s $7,800?”

“A lot of hogs,” Dale said, and Cole laughed so hard milk came out his nose.

By nine-thirty the kids were upstairs. I heard the boys arguing over the top bunk and then Jeff’s low voice settling it. I heard Hannah’s door, and then Kenzie’s little voice through the wall asking Hannah if she was still awake.

By ten the whole house was quiet. Dale went to bed. I stayed up at the kitchen table with a cup of decaf and the notebook from the hutch drawer. I didn’t open it. I just sat with my hand on it.

Then I heard Jeff on the stairs. He came down slow, one hand on the rail, the way you do on old stairs in a dark house. When he came into the light of the kitchen, he had something held flat against his chest.

It was Mom’s yardstick.

The old wooden one from the lumberyard in Sheldon, with the advertising worn half off it and a notch cut at the forty-inch mark where Cole’s great-grandfather had once used it to measure a calf. It had lived on the shelf in that closet since before I was born.

And he had a look on his face I had not seen since we were kids. Since he was five years old and found a litter of kittens in the haymow and came running to get me so I could see them too.

“Tam,” he said. “Did you know this was still up there?”