The Truck in Grandpa’s Gravel Yard

“Does Brooke know about the loan?” he said.

I opened my mouth to say of course, and then I stopped. Did she? She had been at that dining room table in June.

But she had been sitting with her husband, holding his hand, two months before he left. Had anyone told her since?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Then that’s the first thing,” Shane said. “Before anything else.”

“Mom won’t let me near her. Mom says she’s fragile. Mom says leave her be.”

“Your mom’s not the one who signed for ninety-six thousand,” he said. Not unkind. Just a fact, the way he says the culvert on the Nelson road is going to wash out again come spring.

We sat there a long time. I will be honest about the things I thought about doing, because I thought about all of them.

I thought about calling the bank and the title company and pushing the closing back until spring.

But our rate lock ran out at the end of October, and the rate had gone up almost a full point since we locked. That was another eighty dollars a month for thirty years.

And we had given notice on the duplex. The landlord already had a young couple lined up. If we did not close, we would be the ones in a motel.

I thought about calling my aunts, Mom’s cousins, and my cousins in Mitchell, and laying it all out, and letting the family pick a side.

I know exactly how that goes. I have watched it happen in other families. It never ends.

I thought about walking into Grandpa’s kitchen and telling my sister, flat out, to get out of my house.

But nobody had won an argument with my mother since Dad died. And Brooke had cried enough that fall for three people. I was not going to be the next thing that made her cry.

“So what do you want?” Shane said finally.

“I want the house,” I said. “And I want my sister to be all right. And I don’t want to have to pick.”

Shane nodded slowly. Then he got up, got the newspaper out of the recycling bin, and opened it to the classifieds.

There are not many apartments for rent in a town of twelve hundred. That Thursday, the paper listed exactly one: a two-bedroom on the ground floor of the old Lutheran parsonage, now split into three units, a block from the elementary school.

I called on my lunch break. The landlord was a widow named Carol, which made me smile, because Grandpa had always said you could trust any woman named Carol to tell you what the furnace was really like.

“Furnace is new,” she said. “Last winter. Kitchen’s small. Laundry’s in the basement, shared. Seven hundred and fifty a month, and I’d need the first month up front.”

“Is there a yard? For a little girl?”

“There’s a swing set out back the church left. It’s sturdy. My grandson tests it every Sunday.”

I drove over after work. The rooms were clean and the floors were real wood.

The smaller bedroom had a window seat that looked out on the swing set. I stood in that room and pictured Abby curled up in it with her books.