The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Joanie?”

“Hi, Arne,” Aunt Joan called, and blew him a kiss.

He worked his way up the drive, one step and then the walker and then one step, and stopped on the grass in front of the house. I came and stood right beside him.

“Somebody’s been mowing,” he said.

“Somebody has,” I said.

That is when I saw Gordon. He was coming across the grass from the road, walking a little stiff in the right hip, the way he always walks.

He had on a blue work shirt. His gray mustache. In his arms was a big stack of white towels, folded square, the kind they give you in motels.

He saw the lawn chairs first. I watched him see them. Then the cousins, people he had eaten hog roast with on this lawn for forty Labor Days. Then he saw me.

Then he saw Dad.

He stopped dead in the middle of the yard. It got so quiet you could hear the windmill creak. Sixty people, and not one of them said a word. Even the kids at the tire swing had stopped.

Dad lifted one hand off the walker. Not a wave. Just lifted it.

Gordon’s mouth opened and closed once. Then he said, in a voice I had never heard out of him, “Arne. I was going to tell you at the end of summer.”

Dad looked at him for a while. Then he said, “Well, Gordy. It’s Labor Day.”

I do not know who laughed first. I think it was Aunt Joan. Then it was the whole yard, the kind of laughing that is half crying.

Gordon stood in the middle of it with his ears going red, holding those towels like a baby somebody had handed him.

“I brought towels,” he said.

“I see that,” Dad said. “We’re going to need more than that.”

Erik on one side and Gordon on the other got Dad up the porch steps and into the swing, without anybody discussing it. Gordon set the towels on the rail very carefully, like they might go off.

I sat on the top step. Erik leaned on the post with his arms folded. The yard went back to talking, the way relatives know to look away, but I could feel every one of them listening.

Gordon did not sit. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at Dad and not at me, and I was glad of that.

“It’s Jean,” he said. “It’s back. In her bones this time. They found it in April.”

Dad closed his eyes. Jean is Gordon’s wife. She brought a pie to our house every time anybody was born or died for forty years, and she taught me to drive a stick shift when I was fourteen.

“She’s doing chemo in Sioux City every other week,” Gordon said. “Our supplement doesn’t cover what they said. We were eleven thousand out of pocket by June, after the Medicare. I sold the boat.”

“You sold the boat?” Dad said. That got him more than anything.