The Bus Driver Who Bought Her House

I told Tyler that night. He said, “Saturday.” That was all he said.

He came at seven in the morning on Saturday with his own ladder, a borrowed second one from the co-op, a new section of gutter, hangers, a scraper, a mask, primer and a gallon of exterior white he had already matched to the house.

He wouldn’t let me pay for any of it. I tried. I tried three times. The third time he put down the scraper and said, “Mom, you paid for every pair of shoes I outgrew. Let me buy a gallon of paint.”

So I made sandwiches instead, and I held the ladder.

Around two in the afternoon, Dale’s Buick came slowly down Third Street and pulled up at the curb.

He didn’t get out at first. He sat there with the engine running, looking at Tyler up on the ladder, scraping. Then he rolled down his window.

“Don’t go putting money into a house you’re not going to keep,” he called.

Tyler kept scraping. He didn’t look down.

I walked over to the car. “It’s a gallon of paint, Dale,” I said. “Even if you sell it to Omaha, it’ll be a gallon of paint you didn’t have to buy.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at the empty hooks on the porch ceiling, where the swing had been. I saw him see them.

“Lori,” he said. And then he didn’t finish. He rolled the window back up and drove off toward the highway.

Tyler came down the ladder. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

The money from the 403(b) came on day twenty two, a Monday. Twelve thousand three hundred and eighty dollars after the withholding, direct deposit into my checking account, which had never in its life held a number like that.

I logged in and looked at it, and then I logged out, and then I went and sat on the porch steps, because there was no swing to sit on.

Morgan came home the next weekend. She sat at the kitchen table with every document Pam had sent, in a stack, with sticky notes in four colors.

“This one’s the loan estimate,” she said. “This one’s for the homeowner’s insurance. This is the title commitment. You need proof of insurance before closing, so call the agent Monday. And Mom, sign here, here and here.”

I signed. She stacked. Jess made grilled cheese sandwiches. For a little while it felt like the old Saturdays, when they were small and the kitchen was always full.

That Sunday at church, a woman named Brenda who works at the memory care place in Fremont stopped me in the fellowship hall over the coffee urn.

“I heard about your house,” she said, quiet. Everybody had heard. It is Hollis. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, but I see Dale every day.”

“Every day?”

“He comes and sits with Arlene. Lunch and supper. Every single day.” She hesitated. “She doesn’t always know who he is now. He calls bingo for the residents on Tuesdays, so he can be in the room with her.”

I thought about the phone call from the parking lot. B nine.

“It costs a great deal,” Brenda said. “That kind of care. I’m not telling you anything I shouldn’t. I’m just saying he’s had a hard year.”