The Day Mom Took the Front Bedroom

How we came to own a house we never lived in

Six years ago my father lost his apartment over the hardware store on Main Street. The building sold to a man from Louisville who wanted to redo the upstairs, and the new rent was almost double.

Dad was 60 then. He had retired early from the foundry two counties over after thirty-one years, because his back gave out from lifting core boxes and the plant was offering a buyout. The buyout was not much. His pension was less.

He did not tell me he had lost the apartment. I found out from a man at the parts counter who said, kind of careful, that he’d seen Dennis’s truck parked behind the VFW three mornings in a row.

He was sleeping on a buddy’s couch, it turned out. The buddy’s wife wanted him gone. Dad was 60 years old with two duffel bags and a Silverado with 240,000 miles on it, and he had not said one word to his only son.

That same spring Aunt June died. She was Dad’s aunt, his mother’s sister, and she was 91. She went in her sleep in the little white house on Persimmon Street where she had lived since 1958.

June had no children of her own. She had married late, a widower with one grown son named Ron, and when she passed, the house went to Ron. Ron lived in Ohio and did not want a house in southern Indiana.

He put it up for sale at $72,000. It needed a roof and the furnace was a 1987 model that I would not have let a customer run another winter. It sat on the market a month.

I called Ron. I told him who I was, and that Dad needed somewhere to land, and that I could not pay $72,000. He was quiet a minute and then said June had talked about me every Christmas.

He took $64,000. I think he could have gotten more if he had waited. I think he did not want to wait, and I think he wanted June’s house to go to somebody she knew.

I did not have $64,000. I was 33, a heating and air tech for Rick Hollis Heating and Air, with a mortgage of my own and a wife who was still paying on her nursing school loans.

I could get half. I took a home equity loan for $32,000 against our own house. Amy signed for it at the kitchen table without making me explain twice. I paid it off in five years of Saturday side jobs.

The other half came from my mother.

Why my mother paid for her ex-husband’s house

People ask that, when they hear it. Why would a woman who had been divorced from a man for fourteen years at that point put $32,000 into a house so he would have a place to sleep?

There are a few answers, and all of them are true.

The first one is Aunt June. When I was little and Mom was waiting tables at the diner and Dad was on day shift at the foundry, it was June who watched me every summer.

June had a porch swing painted white, and she would sit me on it with a dishpan of green beans between us and teach me to snap them. She called me her helper. She paid me a quarter a pan.

When my parents fought, which was most of my childhood, it was June’s house I got sent to. When they split, the year I was 19, June was the one who drove over to Mom’s apartment with a casserole and sat with her until dark.

“June was more family to me than anybody in the Kolb line,” Mom told me once. “Present company excepted.”

The second answer is that my mother is a practical woman. She had worked twenty-seven years in a school cafeteria. She had $41,000 in savings from three decades of clipping coupons and working banquets on the weekends.

She did the math. She would retire someday. Her rent kept going up. A paid-for house on a quiet street, a house she had loved since before I was born, was the best place she could think of to put money she would someday need.

“Your daddy can stay there until he’s on his feet,” she said. “And when I retire, I’ll want it. We’ll cross that bridge.”

The third answer, the one she would never say out loud, is that she did not want the father of her son sleeping in a truck behind the VFW. She was not in love with him. She had not been in love with him for a very long time. But she was not cruel.

So we closed on it in May. The deed has two names on it, Shane Kolb and Linda Kolb. Dad’s name is not on it. There was never a lease. There was never any rent.

Dad moved in the first week of June. He said thank you once, in the driveway, without looking at either one of us. Then he went inside and shut the door.