The House on Elm Street
“She said it was like she’d never been there at all,” Joyce said. “Walt was a good man. He wasn’t mean. He just didn’t think she needed her name on anything. And then there was nothing to have her name on.”
I stood there holding my coffee cup and didn’t know what to say.
“Rod swore that day his girl would never be in that kitchen,” Joyce said. “Never. Not because of any man, good or bad. That check was the only way he knew how to say it. And then he said it like a fool, in front of everybody, about you. He knows that now.”
“Does he?”
“He’s been sleeping in the recliner. He doesn’t sleep in the recliner.” She took a breath. “He drove by your house four times last week, Cody. I was with him for two of them.”
I didn’t tell Hannah that part right away. I didn’t know how she’d take it. I told her that night, lying in bed in the duplex with the neighbor’s television going through the wall, and she didn’t say anything for a while.
“Four times,” she said finally.
“Your mom says he sits out front in the Tahoe and doesn’t get out.”
“He never could just knock,” she said. “Not even at his own mother’s.”
We closed on December 18th, a Friday, at the title office across from the courthouse. Hannah signed her name twelve times. I counted. Kim brought a little plant in a pot and set it on the table and cried a little, and said it was the second surprise house that went fine.
Moving day was Saturday the 19th. It was cold and bright and there was a skiff of snow on the ground. We’d borrowed a trailer from a buddy of mine on the railroad, Dale, and he came with his son, and two guys from Hannah’s floor at the hospital showed up with a pickup.
Grandma Ida came at nine with a pan of cinnamon rolls and her good quilt. It was the wedding ring quilt her mother pieced in 1938, the one that had been on her own bed for sixty years. She went straight into the front bedroom and spread it on the bed before we’d even set the frame up right.
“Grandma,” I said. “That’s your quilt.”
“It’s a house quilt,” she said. “It goes in a house. It’s been waiting on you two.” She smoothed out the corners with her hands, slow, because her knuckles don’t bend the way they used to. “Now somebody bring me a chair so I can supervise.”
Hannah stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at that quilt, and then at me, and didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
At about ten thirty, a car pulled up out front behind the trailer. It was Joyce’s Buick. Joyce got out of the driver’s side. And after a long minute, Rod got out of the passenger side.
He wasn’t in his overcoat this time. He was in work jeans and an old canvas coat I’d never seen him wear, and a pair of leather gloves, and boots. He looked like he’d dug them out of the back of a closet that morning.