The Knock on My Own Front Door

Part Four: The Tuesday Knock

We turned onto our street on Tuesday at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Our town has one stoplight, two churches with steeples you can see from the county road, a Casey’s, a café, and the co-op elevator on the east edge that you can see from six miles out in any direction.

Our house is a low ranch with cream siding and a wooden front stoop I rebuilt in 1994. It sits on a street of houses just like it, where everybody knows everybody’s car.

The snow piles along the curb were gray with road salt and gravel. The maple in our front yard was bare. And there was a black Chevy pickup I had never seen parked at the curb in front of the house like it lived there.

Brett’s truck was nowhere.

Across the street, Vern’s front curtain moved. Next door to him, Pam Henderson’s moved too. By the time I pulled our old tan Toyota into the driveway, I would guess six households on that street knew Gordon and Ardis Brekke were home two months early.

The Toyota had a thousand miles of road grime up its sides. I had not had the heart to stop and wash it.

Ardis got out, took her rolling suitcase out of the trunk, and wheeled it up the walk to my side. She did not need it. Everything else was still in the trunk. I think she needed something to hold on to.

We walked up the front walk. Somebody had shoveled it, and salted it, clean to the concrete.

Through the front window I could see her African violets on the plant stand where she always kept them. Purple and white, crowded on the stand. Still blooming in March.

Ardis stopped on the walk and looked at them.

“Somebody’s been watering,” she said quietly.

I had my house key in my coat pocket. I had carried it fourteen hundred and eighty miles, and I could feel the shape of it through the lining.

I knocked anyway.

A man who lets himself into his own house with a stranger inside is the one who ends up in Thursday’s sheriff’s log, and half the street was watching. Whoever was in there also deserved to come to the door with his pants on. My father taught me that, and I suppose he taught it to me by knocking.

Three knocks. Hard, but not angry.