The House on Elm Street
Rod waited until the pie was cut. That was how he did things. He let everybody get comfortable first, a fork in one hand and coffee in the other, and then he set down whatever he had been carrying all day.
He reached into the inside pocket of his sport coat and took out a long envelope from the bank. He laid it on the tablecloth and slid it across to my wife with two fingers, past the cranberry dish and the salt and pepper shakers shaped like little pilgrims.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Open it.”
Hannah looked at me before she touched it. I gave her a small nod, because I didn’t know what it was yet, and because she has always looked at me first, ever since our second date, when she wasn’t sure which fork the restaurant wanted her to use.
She opened it. It was a cashier’s check made out to Hannah Andersen Jensen in the amount of forty thousand dollars. I could read the numbers upside down from where I sat. $40,000.00.
“That’s a down payment,” Rod said. “For a house. A real one, not a rented duplex with a neighbor who plays his television through the wall at midnight.”
Joyce, Hannah’s mother, set her fork down very carefully, the way you set something down when you are trying not to make noise in church. Hannah’s brother Jeff found something important to look at on his phone.
“There’s one condition,” Rod said. “The house goes in your name. Yours alone. Not anybody else’s.”
He didn’t look at me when he said that part. He looked at me on the next part.
“A man who works the railroad will never give you a real house, honey. I’ve seen it my whole life. They’re gone half the year, they’re tired the other half, and the wife ends up holding everything. I won’t watch that happen to you.”
The room went so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on in the basement. Somebody’s little boy in the living room laughed at the football game, and his mother shushed him.
I’m a conductor for the Union Pacific. I work a pool freight turn out of North Platte. I get called on two hours’ notice, any hour of the day or night, and I’ve been doing it for nine years.
Last year I made a little over $80,000. Rod knew that. Rod knew it to the dollar, because he asked me once at a Fourth of July picnic, and I told him, because I wasn’t ashamed of it then and I’m not now.
So it was never about the money. I want to be plain about that, because people who hear this story always assume my father-in-law thought I was broke. He didn’t. He thought I was gone. And he thought a man who was gone wasn’t a man who could hold a roof up over his daughter.
Rod owns the Chevrolet dealership out on the highway. He built it from a used lot with eleven cars and a trailer for an office. He’s at that store six days a week in a pressed shirt, and he shakes every hand that walks through the door.