The Tax Bill I Mailed My Stepson

Keith slid the paper across the desk in the finance office and tapped the line with his pen.

“It’s just for the insurance on Dad’s cabin,” he said. “They need your name on it now that he’s gone.”

It was two weeks after the funeral. I was still waking up at four in the morning reaching for a man who was not there, and I was still writing thank-you notes for casseroles.

The finance office was at the back of the dealership in Paducah where Keith sold cars.

It smelled like new carpet and burnt coffee. A young woman with a notary stamp sat at the next desk, waiting.

“You don’t have to read all that,” Keith said, when I picked up the second page.

“It’s the same legal stuff they put on everything. I already went over it with the agent. Sign there, and there.”

I want to tell you I read it. I am a teller at a credit union.

I tell people every single day to read what they sign. I have watched people lose cars and houses over pages they did not read.

But I was so tired, and he was Hank’s boy, and he had his father’s hands. I signed where he pointed. The young woman stamped it and smiled at me like I had done something brave.

“Thanks, Kristi,” Keith said. He folded the papers into an envelope without looking at me. “That’s one less thing for you to worry about.”

He was right about that. For about a month, it was one less thing.

The cabin we built

Hank and I built that cabin ourselves in 2006 on a lakefront lot on Kentucky Lake, about twenty minutes from Benton.

We bought the lot with every dime we had and then some, and we built on weekends for a year and a half.

Hank was a pipefitter at one of the chemical plants in Calvert City. He could read a drawing upside down from across a table.

I could not read one at all when we started, but by the end I could frame a wall.

We did the foundation with his friend Dale and Dale’s nephew, and a rented mixer that Hank swore at in two languages, English and pipefitter.

We did the walls ourselves. We did the cedar siding one board at a time.

I nailed down half the shingles on that first roof. I was thirty-three years old, scared of heights, and stubborn about it.

Hank stood at the bottom of the ladder every morning and said, “You don’t have to,” and I went up anyway.

In 2019 a storm took half those shingles off, and we put a green metal roof on instead. Hank said it sounded like applause when it rained.

He would lie on the couch on a rainy Saturday with his eyes closed and say, “Hear that? They love us.”

It was small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen you could stand in the middle of and touch both counters.

A screened porch on the front, a wooden dock out back, and a shed Hank called his office.

We were not lake people with money. We lived in a little rented house in Benton all those years so we could keep paying on the lot and the materials.

The cabin was the only thing we ever owned outright, and the deed had both our names on it.

Hank died in July, on a Tuesday, at sixty-one. His heart. He was at the plant.

They called me at the credit union, and my manager drove me to the hospital because my hands would not hold the keys.