What Linda Ames Said at the Door

The night

Roger got Bo.

I want to say that clearly, because people who hear this story like to forget it. Linda told him to, and he stood on the porch for a second in his sock feet like he did not know what his own hands were for, and then he came down the steps and went to the van and lifted my eight-year-old out of his booster seat like a sack of feed.

Bo woke up halfway up the walk and said, “Daddy?”

Roger stopped on the sidewalk. He stood there holding my son. And then he said, “No, bud. It’s Roger. You’re all right,” and kept walking.

I carried Kaylee. She was too big to carry, really. She woke up on the steps and looked at the yellow light and at Mrs. Ames’s piano through the front window, and she said, “Is this where the key is?” and I said yes, and she put her head back down.

The spare rooms were at the top of the stairs. There were two of them, one with twin beds and quilts that had belonged to the Ames boys, who were grown and gone to Denver and Tulsa. Linda put June and Bo in the twins and Kaylee in the double across the hall. She found a nightlight in a drawer and plugged it in without being asked.

Then she took me down to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

Roger was sitting at the kitchen table when we came in. He still had the remote in his hand. I do not think he knew he was holding it.

“Sit,” Linda said to me.

I sat. I was still in the dress. I had not taken off the cardigan. I had not cried at the funeral, not really, and I did not cry then either. I was too tired to find where it was.

Linda put a cup of tea in front of me with milk already in it.

Then she turned around and looked at her husband for a long time.

“You know you can’t do that,” she said.

“I sent the notice.”

“A notice doesn’t give you the house back. You have to file. You have to go in front of the judge in the county seat like everybody else. You can’t change a lock on a family in Kansas, Roger. Not since before our boys were born. Your daddy could. You can’t. You know that.”

“Dad never once went to court.”

“Your dad,” Linda said, “would have asked whose funeral it was.”

Roger set the remote on the table. He looked at it like he was surprised to see it there.