The Knock on My Own Front Door

Part One: The Step in Mesa

Ardis and I had wintered in Mesa for six years by then. We rented the same park model every year at a resort full of Iowa and Minnesota plates, where the biggest argument all winter was about the shuffleboard schedule.

It was her idea the first time. I had retired from the grain elevator at 63 after forty years, and my knees had gotten loud about January in a way they never were when I was working. Ardis said she was tired of watching me sit at the kitchen window wishing for something to fix.

So we went. November to May, home for Mother’s Day, every year. And every year, somebody had to watch the house.

The first four winters it was Vern and a neighbor boy who shoveled. Then Brett’s marriage ended, and he moved into an apartment over the old bakery on Main, and Ardis said, “Why should Brett pay rent on that little place when our house sits empty half the year?”

I said that was a good point. I said it was also not how I would have done it.

We worked it out. Brett kept his apartment. He would stop at the house every couple of days, run the faucets on the north wall when it went below zero, check the furnace filter, and keep the walks clear for the mail carrier. In return, he could use the garage for his truck in the bad weeks.

That was the whole deal. It was written on an index card on the refrigerator, in my handwriting. I am a man who likes things written on index cards.

Ardis came back from the pool around four with a towel around her neck and her library book under her arm. She read my face from the gravel lot. Forty-two years of marriage will do that.

“Is it Brett?” she said.

“How did you know?”

“Because you only look like that about Brett.”

I told her everything Vern said. The girlfriend, whose name was Jade. The brother, whose name Vern thought was Austin. The basement. The six hundred dollars a month.

Ardis sat down on the step beside me. She did not cry. She folded her towel into a square on her knees, very neat, and then folded it again.

“Six hundred dollars,” she said. “For our basement. With the sump pump that hollers every time it rains.”

“That’s what he said.”

“Since January.”

“That’s what he said.”

She looked out at the lemon tree across the lot, where the neighbor from Mankato was picking fruit with a coffee can. “What are you going to do, Gordon?”

Part Two: The Calls I Didn’t Make

I would like to tell you I had a plan right then. I did not. What I had was a list of the things I was not going to do, and that list got longer as the evening went.

The first thing I thought about was the sheriff. I thought about it for about a minute.

I knew how that call would go, because I have known the Winnebago County deputies most of their lives. Dale Herman would come out, he would be kind, and he would tell me what I already knew.

A grown man who has been paying rent every month and keeping his things in a basement is not a burglar, even if he paid it to the wrong person. That is a civil matter. You give written notice. You wait. Nobody gets carried out into an Iowa March by a deputy because his landlord turned out to be somebody’s son.

And even if the law had been simple, I was not going to do it. I was not going to send a uniform to my own son’s door in a town of 2,200 people, where the sheriff’s log runs in the paper every Thursday and gets read at the café before it gets read at home.

“Call Brett,” Ardis said that night. We were sitting at the little table in the park model with a plate of crackers nobody was eating. “Just call him. Ask him.”

“And he’ll tell me what?”

“The truth, maybe.”

“On the phone? He’ll have a story ready before the second ring. And he’ll have two days to empty that basement and hide the whole thing. He’s had since Christmas to get one ready.”

Ardis did not like that, and she was right not to. It was a hard thing to say about our son. But I have known Brett for thirty-six years, and on the telephone he has always been somebody else. Smooth. Cheerful. Everything’s fine, Dad.