The Deed I Set Beside His Plate

Ron and Me

Later, while the Auxiliary ladies were cutting cake and the grandkids were popping balloons in the corner, Ron came and found me by the coffee urns.

He stood there a minute with his hands in his pockets. Up close he looked older than sixty-six. There were deep lines around his eyes I had not let myself see in July.

“You could have embarrassed me worse,” he said.

“I didn’t want to embarrass you at all, Ron.”

“I know it.” He looked at the floor. “That’s what got me. You could have stood up there and told everybody what I did. You didn’t. You just set it down.”

“It was Mom’s to decide,” I said. “Not mine. I just wanted her looking at it.”

He nodded slowly.

“I lost everything once,” he said. “Thirty-one years. I walked out with my tools and my truck. I swore I’d never be in that spot again.” He shook his head. “And then I went and put your mother in that spot. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You were thinking about a county home in Seneca,” I said.

He looked at me sharply, then he understood that Walt must have told me, and something in his face eased.

“I’m sorry I said it wasn’t your house,” he said. “At supper that time. That was a low thing to say.”

“It wasn’t my house,” I said. “It’s Mom’s. You were half right.”

He almost smiled. Then he held out his hand, and I shook it, and then, because I am my mother’s daughter, I hugged him. He smelled like pressed cotton and Old Spice and a little bit like carburetor cleaner.

“Thursday,” he said into my hair, embarrassed. “I’m fixing her back porch step Thursday. That one by the garden. It’s been loose since I moved in.”

“It’s been loose since 2014,” I said.

“Well,” Ron said. “It won’t be Thursday night.”

Monday Morning

Ron was at the bank at five minutes to eight on Monday morning. Kathy told me later that he sat in his truck in the lot until she unlocked the door, and then he came in with his hat in his hand and the deed in a plastic sleeve.

He signed it again in front of her, the acknowledgment line, and she stamped it and signed it herself.

Then he drove it to the courthouse and handed it to the Register of Deeds and paid the recording fee out of his own wallet. He would not let my mother pay it. He told her it was the least he owed, and she let him have that.

Mom called me at work that afternoon.

“It’s done,” she said. “The lady at the courthouse called. It’s back in my name.”

“How do you feel?”

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear the radio in her kitchen, the farm report, the same station she had listened to alone for nine years.

“I feel like a woman who has a house and a fella both,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d ever have both again.”