The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

Saturday noon a car I knew came slowly down the gravel and stopped by the road. It was Jean, with a scarf tied over her head, so thin that I did not know her for a second.

I put my plate down and walked out to the car. She rolled the window down. She was crying already.

“I told him all summer, Gordon, you go tell Arne,” she said. “I didn’t know about the key, honey. I didn’t know where the money was coming from until July. I’m so sorry.”

“Come out of the car, Jean,” I said. “Come sit with Dad. He’s been asking about you.”

The women of my family closed around Jean like a quilt. Inside of five minutes she had a chair in the shade, a plate she was not going to eat, and Aunt Joan holding her hand.

Dad had them move his chair beside her. The two of them sat there all afternoon, not talking much, watching the kids on the tire swing.

Saturday night after the hog roast, Dad asked if he could sleep in the house instead of the motel in town. He asked so quietly I did not hear him the first time.

“In my own bed,” he said. “If it’s not too much trouble. Just the one night.”

The stairs were the problem. Dad’s hip was good for a walker on flat ground and not much else. So Erik went and got Gordon, and the two of them made a chair of their arms and carried my father up the stairs of his own house.

Gordon’s face, going up those stairs, I am not going to try to describe.

I helped Dad into his pajamas and got his shoes off. On the cedar chest at the foot of the bed was my mother’s wedding ring quilt. I had found it folded in the closet with the pictures, and I spread it over him.

He lay back on his own pillow with a sound I will hear the rest of my life. It was not a word. It was the sound of something being set down that you had carried a long time.

He turned and looked at the other side of the bed, at my mother’s pillow, and he reached over and patted it twice.

“Your mother would have liked all this noise,” he said. Out the window the cousins were still laughing by the fire. “She always said a house is just lumber until somebody’s in it.”

“I know, Dad,” I said.

“Gordy’s not wrong about that,” he said. “That’s what makes it worse.”

He was asleep in two minutes. I turned off the lamp and sat on the top step outside his room, where I used to sit as a little girl when they had company, and listened to my father snore in his own house.

I cried for a while in the dark. For Mom, and the pictures in the dish towels, and Jean’s scarf, and how old Dad’s hands had gotten. Mike came up and sat on the step below me and did not say a thing.

Sunday was church, then cards and horseshoes and leftovers, then what we always did on the last night: fireworks in the pasture. Erik buys them over the Fourth when the stands are open and saves them back.