The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

If Erik drove over that night, Gordon would take the listing down, hand over the key, and nobody would ever say another word. It would get buried, and Dad would keep asking me every Sunday.

That night I opened the listing on my couch, with my husband Mike asleep in his chair and the ballgame on low. I looked at the calendar to see how bad it was.

That is when I noticed one weekend was still open. Labor Day weekend. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, checkout Monday at eleven.

For as long as I have been alive, and eight years before that, the Halvorsen family reunion has been on Dad’s farm on Labor Day weekend. My grandmother started it. My mother ran it for thirty years like a general.

Dad’s job was the hog roast and the horseshoe pit and telling the same three stories to anybody who sat still long enough. Kids slept in the haymow. Some years we had over a hundred.

This year we canceled it. Dad could not host from a walker, and nobody wanted to stand around a yard that was not his anymore. My cousin Jeff sent the message out in May.

Dad said he understood. Then he never mentioned it again, which is how I knew it hurt him worse than the hip.

I sat looking at that open weekend for a long time. Then I woke Mike up.

“How would you feel,” I said, “about renting my dad’s house?”

Mike rubbed his face and looked at the phone and looked at me. He has been married to me for nineteen years. He knows my face when I have already decided.

“Under whose name?” he said.

“Yours,” I said. “Gordon knows my name. He’s met you twice and called you Mark both times.”

Mike laughed so hard he woke the dog.

The listing said sleeps 6, so I booked it for 6 guests. That was the truth. Six of us slept in the house. Everybody else slept in campers and tents in the yard and motels in town, like every reunion we ever had.

Three nights at $140 came to $420, all in, the way the listing said. Mike’s card. Mike’s name.

A box popped up asking us to tell our host about the trip. I typed: Family weekend. Coming home for Labor Day.

Twenty minutes later Gordy wrote back. Welcome, Mike! You’ll love it here. Real quiet. Check in is at 3. I’ll send the lockbox code the day before. Please no parties.

I read “please no parties” out loud to Mike and he had to leave the room.

Then I called Erik and told him what I had done. There was the longest pause I have ever heard from my brother, and then a sound I had not heard since our mother died. He was laughing.

“You rented Dad’s house from Gordy,” he said.

“For Labor Day,” I said. “So the reunion is back on. If you’ll call Prairie View and see about getting Dad out for the weekend.”

The nurse at Prairie View said residents could sign out overnight with family as long as somebody responsible took the medication list and the pill organizer and had him back by Monday supper.