The Sign in My Son’s Front Yard

Here is the math, so you understand that we were not trying to get rich off our own son.

A year and a half before that party, Doug and I had taken $148,000 out of what we had saved for retirement and bought that little white house outright.

It was a two-bedroom ranch with a full basement and a one-stall garage, built in 1962, with a chain-link fence around the backyard and a maple tree that turned the color of a fire engine every October. It was four blocks from the grade school.

Kyle and Jessa had been renting a duplex out by the highway for $850 a month. The landlord lived in Kearney and never fixed anything.

The furnace went out twice the winter after Hazel was born, and Kyle slept on the living room floor next to the space heater to keep an eye on it.

Kyle had just gotten on as an apprentice lineman with the public power district.

It is a good job, a job with a future, but an apprentice lineman starts out making a lot less than a journeyman, and the first years are hard on a young family.

Jessa was home with the babies. She had worked at the bank before Rylan was born, and she had planned to go back, but daycare in our town was full and there was a waiting list at the only place that took toddlers. So she stayed home, which I respected.

Doug and I talked about it for a whole winter. We had our savings in CDs at the bank, laddered out the way our banker had shown us.

It was the money we had been setting aside since our own kids were small. It was supposed to be what let Doug quit lifting grain at sixty-five.

Doug has worked at the co-op elevator for thirty-four years. In harvest he runs the dump pit, and he comes home with dust in his ears and his eyebrows.

His knees are not what they were. Neither are his shoulders. That money was his rest.

But we kept looking at that duplex, and at Hazel’s little cheeks red from the cold, and in the end we did it.

We bought the house in our own names and told Kyle and Jessa they could live in it as long as they wanted.

We never wrote up a lease or a note. Doug said paper was for strangers, and I agreed with him. I have thought about that more than anything else in this story.

We asked for $200 a month. That was it.

I sat at our kitchen table with the county assessor’s numbers and our insurance agent’s quote and figured it down to the penny on the back of a seed-corn calendar.

The property taxes on that house came to about $1,900 a year. In Nebraska you pay them in two halves, and if you are late the county does not care whose grandbabies live there.

The insurance on a house you do not live in yourself ran another $900 a year.

So that was $2,800 a year just to own the place. Two hundred a month came to $2,400.

Doug and I covered the other four hundred and never said a word about it. We were not making a dime. We were not even breaking even.

What we were trying to do was simple. We did not want to pay $148,000 for a house and then pay for it again every year out of the little bit we had left.

We wanted the house to carry itself. That was all the $200 was ever for.