The Knock on My Own Front Door
“I want to see his face,” I said. “That’s all. I want to be standing in front of him when he tells me.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll know what to do.”
She looked at me a long time over the crackers. Then she got up, took the calendar off the wall, and counted on her fingers.
“Our lease here runs through April,” she said. “We’ll lose the rest of it.”
“I know.”
“And Brett will see us coming. Vern will tell somebody, or somebody will see the Toyota at the Casey’s and say so at church.”
“Then he’ll see us coming,” I said. “I’m not sneaking up on my own house.”
We told the park manager the next morning that we had a family matter at home. She was nice about it. Everybody down there is nice about it, because everybody down there has a family matter at home sooner or later.
We spent three days shutting the place down. Ardis cleaned the refrigerator. I drained the hoses and took the folding chairs in. Our friends from Spirit Lake had us over for a goodbye supper on Saturday and did not ask a single question, which is about the kindest thing one Iowa couple can do for another.
Part Three: Fourteen Hundred and Eighty Miles
We pulled out of the park Sunday at daybreak. It is 1,480 miles from that lot in Mesa to our driveway, the way I drive it. I had done it twelve times. I had never done it in March.
The first day was all desert and quiet. Up through Payson, over the rim, across to the interstate. Ardis knitted for an hour and then put it away and just watched the country go by.
We stopped the first night at a motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, with a neon sign shaped like an arrow. I could not sleep. I lay there listening to the trucks on the interstate and doing arithmetic I did not want to do.
Six hundred dollars a month. January, February, March. Eighteen hundred dollars of somebody’s paychecks, handed to my son for a room in my house, while I paid the property taxes on it.
The second day we crossed the Texas panhandle in the wind and came up into Kansas. Somewhere past Liberal, Ardis said the first thing she had said in two hundred miles.
“Do you remember when he was eight and he brought home that dog?”
“Biscuit,” I said.
“He hid that dog in the garage for four days. Fed it his own lunch meat. He was so afraid you’d make him take it back.”
“I didn’t make him take it back.”
“No,” she said. “But he was afraid you would. He was always afraid of that, Gordon. He was always afraid of disappointing you more than anything else in the world.”
I did not answer that. I did not have an answer for it. I drove.
We stayed the second night in Salina. I called Vern from the motel parking lot so Ardis would not hear me.
“Black pickup’s still in your driveway,” he said. “The brother’s. Brett’s been around most days. His truck comes and goes. The girl leaves for the care center about six every morning.”
“Thank you, Vern.”
“Gordon,” he said. “Go easy, if you can. That boy’s been carrying something. You can see it in how he walks.”
Tuesday morning we left Salina at five, in the dark, and went north up past Concordia toward Nebraska. The fields were brown and wet and empty. Ardis had her hands in her lap.
Outside Concordia, she said, “He never asks us for a dime.”
“No,” I said. “Maybe that’s the trouble.”
She looked over at me then. I think it was the first thing I had said on that whole trip that she agreed with.
We crossed into Iowa at Council Bluffs a little before ten. The snow started showing up in the ditches north of Ames, old and crusted, gray along the shoulders where the plows had thrown it.
I knew every grain elevator on that road. I could have told you which co-op owned it, what it held, and who managed it in 1990. Ardis let me do that for a few miles. I think she knew I needed to.