Two Children and One Home Place

She said she’d see. She called me Tuesday on her break, a call I did not mark on the calendar, because I was too busy with the receiver to find the pencil. She said she had two days of vacation she’d been meaning to use, and she could be in Cedar Rapids Friday night, and was it all right if she came alone?

I said it was all right. I said we’d leave the porch light on.

She got in at twenty to ten on Friday night, three hours behind schedule, and the last seventy miles from Cedar Rapids took her nearly three because of a salt truck that wouldn’t pass. I had the porch light on and the yard light on and the kitchen light on, and Dale had shoveled the walk twice.

She came up the steps in a long gray wool coat that was not made for Iowa, carrying one small bag. Renae is thirty-eight. She has my mother’s forehead and Dale’s habit of holding her shoulders a little too straight when she is nervous, and she stood in the door a second with snow in her hair before she put her arms around me.

“You look tired, Mom,” she said into my shoulder.

“I’m sixty-eight. It’s allowed.”

She slept in her old room under the quilt with the Ohio stars.

Saturday morning Kurt came at six, the way he always does, and Tara sent the kids to her mother’s so we’d have the house. By eight there were four of us in the kitchen. The percolator was going, the oak table had been wiped down twice, and the plat lay in the middle of it with Dale’s two words across the top.

Renae sat on the side nearest the window. Dale was at the head, and I took the chair by the stove. Kurt stayed against the counter by the bread box, in the brown Carhartt.

The wall calendar hung on its nail beside the refrigerator, under the school pictures and the one photo of the four of us at the state fair in 1996. I had stopped seeing it years ago.

Nobody said anything. Dale looked at me. It was mine to start, and I was grateful for that. Better to say it than to have it said about me.

“I’m going to tell you something first,” I said, “and then your father’s going to tell you something, and then we’re going to ask what you two want. We haven’t decided anything. I want you to hear that. It’s all on the table.”

Renae said, “Okay.”

So I told her. I told her about Verlyn Meyer’s funeral and the three pews, and the lawyer in Waverly, and the five reasons I’d given Dale on Sunday, the true ones. Then I told her about the sixth.

I said it in about the same words I had used in the dark. I said I’d wanted her to lose something. I said I’d wanted Kurt to never leave. I did not make it prettier. I kept my hands in my lap and looked at her face the whole time.

Renae did not move. When I finished she let out a breath through her nose, and I saw the corner of her mouth go sideways, a thing she has done since she was nine.

“Well,” she said. “So who got it?”