The House on Elm Street
I came around and stood in front of her. I had on my tan Carhartt jacket over a gray hoodie, the jacket she says makes me look like I’m about to go check on cattle. I reached in my pocket and held up the key.
One key, Mrs. Hall’s, pulled off her silver ring. The sun was just coming up behind the house, and the frost was starting to steam.
Hannah put her hand over her mouth.
“Cody,” she said through her fingers. “Whose house is this?”
“Ours,” I said. “If you’ll sign.”
“What?”
“The seller let me have a key early so I could paint. Kim wrote it up. It’s legal. Closing is December 18th.”
“Whose name is on it?” Her voice cracked right in the middle. “Cody. Whose name is on it?”
“Both of them,” I said. “Mine and yours. Right next to each other on the title. Closing is December 18th, and yours is the only signature it’s still waiting on.”
She didn’t move. Her breath was coming out in little clouds, and her hand was still over her mouth, and her eyes were full. A neighbor across the street came out in a bathrobe for his newspaper and went right back inside without picking it up.
“How?” she said. “We don’t have it. We don’t have any of this.”
“Twenty-six thousand dollars,” I said. “Two years. Every holiday I worked. Every extra call. I never touched it.”
“You did this,” she said slowly, “on the nights you were gone.”
“Every one of them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
That’s the question I’d been practicing for two years, and when it came, everything I’d practiced went out of my head. So I just told her the truth.
“Because I didn’t want you to have a house your daddy bought,” I said. “I wanted you to have one we did.”
She took her hand away from her mouth then. She came up the step and put both arms around my neck, and she held on so hard the key bit into my palm. I stood there on the frost with my wife hanging on me and didn’t care who saw.
I unlocked the front door, and we went in. The house smelled like fresh paint and Mrs. Hall’s lavender sachets, which she’d left in every closet. The living room floors were oak, and the morning light came straight across them through the front window.
Hannah walked through every room without saying a word. Two bedrooms. One bathroom with pink tile from 1958 that she said she’d keep forever. A back bedroom half painted, a pale yellow, with my drop cloth still on the floor and the roller in its tray.
“You picked yellow,” she said.
“You said once you wanted a yellow room someday. For a nursery. Someday.”
She put her hand flat on the wall where the paint was dry and stood there a while.
Then I went back to the truck and got the coffee can. I brought it into the kitchen and set it on the counter by the sink, and took the grocery sack off it, and pushed it over to her.
“What’s this?” she said. “That’s Grandma Ida’s.”
“Open it.”