The Little House Next Door

Curt laid the printout on the kitchen table the way he used to lay down a royal flush at the Legion, flat and slow, with his palm smoothing out the crease.

It was a lake lot on Minnewaska, a hundred and ten feet of shoreline, a dock already in, and a price circled in red pen.

“Look at that,” he said. “Sunrise side. You can see the bluff from the water. I drove past it twice today between yield checks and I about drove into the ditch.”

I looked at it. It was a pretty lot. There was a birch tree in the picture leaning over the water, and somebody had left a canoe upside down on the grass, and I could see why a man would want it.

Then he laid down the second paper. It was a brochure from the county home in Glenwood, with a picture of a smiling nurse and a woman in a wheelchair holding a cat.

On the back, in his handwriting, he had written $3,900 and underlined it twice.

“That’s the assisted living wing,” he said. “I called today. They have a room opening the first of October. Mom’s Social Security and Dad’s pension cover most of it. We’d make up the rest.”

“With what?” I asked.

“With the farm money. A little of it, a month at a time. The rest just sits in her checking account doing nothing, Robin. Eighty thousand dollars doing nothing. Mom would want us to have it. She’d want us to have the lake place. She always said so.”

I set my coffee cup down. It was a Tuesday in late August, and the kitchen smelled like the zucchini bread Helen and I had made out of the last of the garden.

Outside the window the beans across the road were just starting to yellow at the bottom.

“Did you ask her?” I said.

He looked at his coffee. He has a way of looking at his coffee when he does not want to look at me, and after twenty-nine years I know it the way I know the sound of his truck in the driveway.

“She doesn’t know what day it is,” he said. “She doesn’t know what month it is. Last week she called me Elmer. You think she knows what eighty thousand dollars is? She won’t know the difference between a lake lot and a parking lot.”

That was the cruel part. Not the money. The way he said she would not know the difference, like his mother had already left the room and only her body was sitting there in her blue housecoat waiting to be moved somewhere.

I did not raise my voice. I have never been a woman who raises her voice, and I was not going to start over a brochure with a cat on it.

“She knows Tuesday,” I said. “Tuesday is the day she bakes. Who do you think made that zucchini bread? I only grated.”

He folded the lake lot printout in half and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he got up, rinsed his cup, set it upside down in the drainer, and went out to the truck.

I heard him back out of the driveway, slower than usual, the way he drives when he is thinking.

I sat there a long while. Then I got the folder out of the hall closet, the green one with the rubber band around it, and opened it on the table where the lake lot had been.