The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

“I sold the boat, Arne.” Gordon looked out at the corn. “I was coming down every week to run the water and check the furnace, and the place was just sitting. A good house, just sitting.”

“Jean’s sister did one of these farm stays down by Pella. She said people pay good money for a quiet house in the country.”

“I told myself it was better for the house to have people in it than mice. I told myself I’d tell you at the end of summer and give you a share.”

He wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. “I told myself a lot of things. The first night, I sat in my truck at the end of your lane and watched strangers’ lights come on in your kitchen, and I knew.”

Nobody said anything. Then I said the one thing I had driven two hundred miles to say.

“I need the key, Gordon.”

He nodded. He did not argue, and he did not say one word in his own defense, which I will give him to the end of my days. He reached for his shirt pocket, and his hand came out empty.

“It’s in the box,” he said. “On the rail. You know the code.”

“I know the code,” I said. “It’s my mother’s birthday.”

That hit him harder than anything else that afternoon. He put his hand on the porch post to steady himself.

Dad opened his eyes. “Let’s eat,” he said. “I haven’t had a decent ham ball since February. We’ll talk about it when everybody’s fed.”

I will be honest about the rest of that weekend, including the parts that do not make me look as good.

I made Gordon be our host. I never did it with a mean word or to shame him in front of people. But he had taken money all summer for being a host, and for one weekend, he was going to be one, for us.

Friday night the upstairs toilet started running, the way it has run since 1987. I sent a message through the app. Twelve minutes later Gordon came across the grass with his toolbox and fixed the flapper.

Saturday morning there was not enough coffee. Gordon came with the big forty-cup percolator from the church basement and stood in my mother’s kitchen and made coffee for the Halvorsen reunion.

My cousins thanked him one by one. Not one of them was unkind to him. I think that was harder on him than if they had been.

Saturday afternoon we needed more tables for the hog roast. Gordon brought three from his machine shed in his pickup and would not let Erik help. Erik helped anyway.

The two of them did not say a word to each other the whole time, which for men like them is practically a conversation.

Somewhere in there I stopped being angry and started feeling bad, and I did not like that either. Mike caught me at the kitchen window watching Gordon carry a table across the yard.

“You can stop now, you know,” Mike said. “Nobody’s keeping score.”

“I’m keeping score,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying.”