The Deed I Set Beside His Plate

“It’s just paper, Jenna,” Ron said, and he reached past me for the gravy like the conversation was over. “Saves your mother a bundle. You’d know that if you’d let a man finish.”

My mother was smiling at her plate. She had told me the news herself, proud of it, the way she used to tell me she had gotten the school board to buy a new mixer.

“I signed the house over to Ron,” she had said, passing the green beans. “Well, a quitclaim. On account of the taxes. Ron knows a fellow.”

I set my fork down. It was the second Sunday of July, ninety-four degrees outside, and the window unit in Mom’s dining room was rattling the way it had rattled since Dad bought it in 1998.

“You signed the house over,” I said. “This house.”

“It’s paid off,” Mom said, as if that answered something. “Your dad and I paid it off in 2009. That’s why it matters, Ron says. A paid-off house is a target.”

Ron nodded. He had a gray mustache he kept trimmed with little scissors at the kitchen sink, and he wore western snap shirts every day of the week, pressed, with the snaps done up neat.

He was sixty-six. He had been in my mother’s life for eight months. He had been living in her house since April.

“A target for what?” I asked.

“The state,” Ron said. “Estate tax. Nursing homes. They take it all, Jenna. I’ve seen it. You want your mother to lose this place to some county bean counter?”

I work at the county extension office. I have spent nineteen years answering questions from farm widows about land and taxes and what happens to the home place. Kansas has not had an estate tax since 2010.

I did not say that at the table. I should tell you why.

My mother was smiling. She had a lavender blouse on that I had bought her for Easter, and her short white curls were fresh from the beauty shop on Saturday, and she had made fried chicken for four people in July because Ron liked fried chicken.

She had been a widow for nine years. For most of those nine years she ate supper alone at the kitchen counter with the radio on.

Then she met Ron at the senior center fish fry in November, and for the first time since we buried Dad, my mother laughed out loud at her own table.

My husband Tom was sitting beside me. He put his hand on my knee under the tablecloth, not to stop me, just to let me know he had heard it too.

“Well,” I said. “I hope it works out like the fellow says.”

Ron looked at me a long second. Then he smiled the way you smile at a child who has given up.

“It’s not your house, honey,” he said. “Never was. Your mother’s a grown woman.”

Mom laughed a little and said, “Ron,” the way you scold a dog that has jumped on company. And then she asked who wanted pie.