The Barn Dance That Built a House

Marv Gruber hit the opening bars of a two-step on the fiddle.

I wasn’t ready for what Bree did next. She held Josie out to Nate and walked the length of the barn to the crib. She lifted out the blue blanket and unfolded it, and I could see from where I stood that it was nothing like the one she had lost. It was a deeper blue, with a crocheted edge instead of satin, and worked in a pattern of small stars you could only see when you held it to the light.

There was a card pinned to one corner. I had not known about it. Gladys told me afterward that she’d made the blanket in the last two weeks in her own sewing room, with a flashlight in her teeth the night the lamp bulb burned out, because she didn’t want to stop.

Bree read the card. She read it a second time and put her free hand flat against her mouth.

I walked over. I couldn’t help it. She held the card out to me, and I read it standing next to her.

Can’t replace. Made her a new one anyway. Gladys Rademacher, line 87.

Bree laughed once, a short sound like a hiccup. Then she looked at me.

This was the moment I had dreaded since the day I stood in the back office of the hardware store with a copy machine humming behind me. I made myself hold her eyes.

“Bree,” I said. “I took your list. I should have asked you. I’m sorry.”

She looked at the card. She looked at the long wall of paper, with its pens and its pencils and all those names.

“Colleen,” she said. “Nobody can read my handwriting.”

“I know.”

“The adjuster couldn’t. Nate couldn’t. My mother can’t.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “You read the whole thing.”

“I did.”

“I wrote down two hundred and twelve things,” she said, “because I thought if I counted them all, it would stop feeling like I’d lost something I couldn’t count.”

I couldn’t answer. She put her forehead against my shoulder with the blanket and the card crushed between us, and stayed there a moment. Then she stood up and smoothed her hair.

“Is it too late to take a line?” she said. “I’d like to take one.”

“Which one?”

“The pie. I know there’s pie.”

That was the funniest thing anyone said all night.

Nate had not moved from the doorway. He stood with Josie in his arms and Colt holding onto his leg and his cap in his hand. He had taken it off the moment he came through the door. I had seen him do the same at his father’s funeral.

He looked at the kitchen and the wall. Then he looked at me across thirty feet of swept concrete, and his face did something I had never seen it do, which was give up.

He walked over and held out his hand, and I took it.

“Mrs. Hovland,” he said. “You told me to come eat.”

“I did.”

“You just left a little out.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’d have said no, if you’d told me. I’d have sat in the car.”

I thought of my father and the pickup and the foil plate on the dash. “I know,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”