The House That Rolled Down the County Road

Why

Gordon was still at the edge of the yard when the crew pulled out. Jake walked over to him. I went too, because I was done letting Jake carry things alone.

“Why, Dad?” Jake asked. Just that.

Gordon looked at the house for a long time before he answered.

“My dad charged me for my ground,” he said. “Every month for nineteen years, until the day he died. Fifty dollars, then a hundred, then two. He said that’s how a son learns what things cost. That a man doesn’t get anything for free, not even from his father.”

He turned his hat around in his hands.

“I hated him for it,” he said. “And then I did the same thing to you. I thought that was just how it was done. I thought that was what made me a man.”

“And the house?” I asked. “Telling me the house was yours?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“Bill Hanson asked me what happens to the place when I’m gone,” he said. “I got scared. I got it in my head that if the house was mine, you’d always stay. You’d have to.”

He looked down at his boots.

“I never once thought you’d leave,” he said. “It never crossed my mind that you could.”

Jake’s jaw worked. “You told your own grandson his height marks were on your ground.”

“I didn’t tell him that.”

“He heard it anyway, Dad. They hear everything.”

Gordon closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were wet, and I had never in eleven years seen Gordon Rasmussen with wet eyes. Not even at Ruthann’s funeral.

Supper

We had no power yet. The electrician was not coming until Monday. The water was not hooked up. The house was level, but it was not ready.

I did not care. I wanted supper in my own kitchen.

Dad hauled over his old green Coleman stove from the shop and two lanterns. I had a pot of chili in his refrigerator from the night before and a jug of water. Hailey found the box marked “Kitchen, bowls” and unwrapped six of them from the newspaper.

Six. I had counted us without thinking. Jake, me, the kids, Dad.

And Gordon.

He was still out in the yard, standing by his pickup, keys in his hand like he could not decide whether to go.

I went out on the porch. The sun was going down red over the windbreak, and the air was getting sharp.

“Gordon,” I said. “Supper’s on. It’s just chili.”

He looked at me like I had said something in a foreign language.

“Kayla, I don’t think I ought to.”

“I made too much,” I said. “Come in. Wipe your boots.”

He came in. He wiped his boots on the mat by the back door, the same mat that had been in front of that same door for eleven years, three miles up the road.

We ate by lantern light around the kitchen table, sitting on overturned five-gallon buckets because the chairs were still tied down. The chili was good. Nobody talked much.

Cole was the one who got up first. He went to the pantry door, pointed his flashlight up the frame, and looked over his shoulder at his grandpa.

“Grandma wrote that one,” he said, pointing at the bottom mark. “When I was one.”

Gordon got up off his bucket. He walked over and crouched down, slow, his knees popping, and looked at his wife’s handwriting in the lantern light for a long time.

Then he reached out and touched it with one finger.

“She did,” he said, and his voice broke right in half. “That’s her.”

Cole leaned against his grandpa’s shoulder. Gordon put his arm around him and did not let go for a long time.