The Town Girl Who Bought the Farm Back

The Door Frame

We closed on April 22nd at the title company in Kearney. Tom Riley shook my hand and said he had been to a lot of land sales and never had a client stop at a half before.

That afternoon we drove out with the keys, all four of us, and Walt followed in his pickup. I had asked him to come. He had said he would, and then he had called back an hour later to ask if I was sure.

Mr. Ostrander had left the house clean and empty. He had painted the inside the year he bought it, the whole downstairs in one flat white, and he had done a careful job of it. He had not known what he was painting over.

In the kitchen, the frame of the door to the back porch was smooth and white from top to bottom.

Every April from the time he could stand, June had backed Luke up against that door frame on his birthday and made a pencil mark at the top of his head, with the date beside it in her small slanted writing. Every year until he graduated.

The week of the funeral, while everybody else was in the living room with casseroles, I had gone into the kitchen with my phone and photographed every one of those marks, close up, a ruler held beside them. I did not know why. I just did not want them lost.

I had never told anybody. I took out my phone and pulled up the pictures and handed it to Walt.

He looked at the screen for a long time. Then he took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket.

I had brought a carpenter’s pencil and a tape measure from Luke’s toolbox. Luke stood in the doorway to the dining room and did not say anything.

“Read them to me,” I said.

Walt cleared his throat. “Luke,” he said. “Third birthday. April 12th, 1988. Thirty-five and a half inches.”

I measured up from the floor and made a short, careful line and wrote the date beside it, as close to June’s hand as I could manage.

“Fourth birthday,” Walt said. “Thirty-eight inches.” His voice was steady for that one.

We went up the door frame a year at a time. The sixth birthday, when June had written “lost a tooth” beside it. The ninth, when Luke had stood on his toes and she had written “cheater” and then measured him again.

Around the eleventh birthday, Walt had to stop and take off his glasses and wipe them on his shirt, and I waited. Hailey came and stood next to me and held the tape measure so I could use both hands.

The last one was the eighteenth birthday, six foot one. I had to stand on a kitchen chair.

Then Walt put his glasses back in his pocket and held out his hand for the pencil.

“Come here, Hailey,” he said.

She stood against the frame with her heels on the floor, and he laid the flat of the tape measure on top of her head the way June used to, and drew the line, and wrote the date in his own big square hand.

Then Cody. Cody stood on his toes, and Walt looked at his feet over his glasses and said, “Cheater,” and made him stand flat.

Luke laughed out loud, the first time I had heard him laugh like that in a long while. Then he went out on the back porch for a few minutes, and nobody followed him, because we all knew why.