The Truck in Grandpa’s Gravel Yard

To understand why that hurt the way it did, you have to understand Grandpa Arvid’s house, and you have to understand that for six weeks after his funeral, nobody in my family wanted it but me.

It sits on five acres off a county blacktop in eastern South Dakota, three miles outside a town of about twelve hundred people. White clapboard, two stories, green shutters Grandpa painted every fourth summer whether they needed it or not.

The porch runs the whole front of the house. Grandma used to say it was wide enough for a church picnic, and one August it actually was, when the Lutheran ladies had theirs out there after the basement flooded.

There is a row of cottonwoods along the north side that Grandpa planted for a windbreak the year he married her.

They are enormous now. In October the leaves come down all at once, and the yard goes gold for about a week.

The house is not fancy. The upstairs bathroom has a pink tub. The furnace is from 1994. The windows rattle when the wind comes across from the west, which in that part of the state is most days.

But I learned to ride a bike in that gravel yard. I learned to make lefse in that kitchen.

And on the pantry door frame, in pencil, are the marks Grandpa made every summer to show how tall my sister and I had grown.

When he died in June, at ninety-one, in his own bed, the house went into his estate. Mom was his only child, so she was named executor, and the estate had to be settled before anything could be sold or split.

The first Sunday after the funeral, Mom sat all of us down at her dining room table. Me and Shane, Brooke and her husband, my two cousins from Mitchell on speakerphone.

“The appraisal came back at a hundred and forty-two thousand,” she said. “Your grandpa wanted this place to stay in the family. So whoever wants it can buy it from the estate for a hundred and ten. That’s the family price.”

Nobody said anything. My cousins both had houses already. Brooke and her husband had just put new carpet in their place in town. Everybody looked at their coffee cups.

“Anyone?” Mom said.

I looked at Shane. Shane looked at me. We had been renting a duplex in town for six years, saving every month, telling ourselves next year, next year.

“We’ll take it,” I said.

I still remember the look on Mom’s face. She was pleased, I think. She nodded and wrote something on her notepad and said, “Good. That’s settled, then.” And for a few weeks, it was.

People hear “family discount” and think somebody handed us a house. Nobody handed us anything. Shane and I put down fourteen thousand dollars, which was every penny we had saved since we got married.

The bank in town lent us the other ninety-six. Thirty years, a little over seven percent, a payment of about eight hundred and fifty a month with the taxes and insurance folded in. More than our rent. A lot more.

Shane works for the county road department. He plows in winter and patches blacktop in summer. I clean teeth four days a week at a practice in the county seat. We are not people who sign for ninety-six thousand dollars lightly.