The Knock on My Own Front Door

Behind her, on the windowsill, sat her mother’s old Christmas cactus in its chipped blue crock. It had not bloomed in three years. It was covered in pink flowers.

“Well,” Ardis said, very softly. “Would you look at that.”

Austin was standing in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor.

“Who’s been taking care of these?” I asked him.

“Brett,” he said. “Every Sunday. He won’t let anybody else touch them. Jade tried to water one once and he about had a fit.”

I did not look at Ardis. I did not think either of us could stand it.

“Show me the basement,” I said.

He took me down. Our basement is an old Iowa basement, half finished. Poured walls, a shower stall I put in when Brett was in high school, the furnace and water heater on one end, and Ardis’s canning shelves on the other.

Austin had a cot, a dresser that used to be in Brett’s old bedroom, and a folding table with a laptop on it. His work boots were lined up by the stairs. A hard hat on the dresser carried a sticker from the ethanol plant down the highway.

His clothes were folded. His bed was made tight enough to bounce a quarter. Over the cot, he had thumbtacked one photograph to the wall, of a woman about my age standing in front of a farmhouse.

“My mom,” he said, when he saw me looking. “She passed two years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’d skin me,” he said. “If she knew I was living in somebody’s basement without them knowing. She’d drive down here and pull me out by my ear.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I should have,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the cot and rubbed his face. “I should have asked to see something. Anything. But Brett’s a good guy, Mr. Brekke. He’s my sister’s guy. He said it was his. Why would I think he’d lie about that?”

“How long have you been at the ethanol plant?”

“Four years. Second shift, three to eleven, but I’m off this week.” He looked up at me. “I lost my place in Mason City at Christmas. Landlord sold the building. Brett said I could stay here till I found something. Then he said six hundred a month would help him out, and it was cheaper than anything I could find. I didn’t think twice.”

He reached into the top drawer of the dresser and handed me a little spiral notebook. On the first page, in careful block letters: January 1, $600, paid Brett. February 1, $600, paid Brett. March 1, $600, paid Brett.

“That’s yours,” he said. “If you need it.”

I gave it back to him. “That’s yours,” I said. “You paid it.”

We went back upstairs. Ardis had put the coffee on. She had found her coffee can in a different cupboard than she left it and moved it back to the right one, which is how I knew she was going to be all right.

Jade came home at 3:20. I heard her car before I saw it, an old Malibu with a tired muffler. She came through the side door in her scrubs from the care center, saying, “Babe, did you get the…” and then she saw us at the kitchen table and stopped like she had hit a wall.