The Little House Next Door

Asking Helen

I did not want to do any of it behind her back. That was the whole point. Curt had made a plan for his mother without asking her, and I was not going to make a different plan the same way.

So on Thursday I walked her next door in her blue housecoat, because she would not put on anything else that week. Arlene was waiting with coffee.

Helen walked through that little house slowly, one hand on the wall. She opened the kitchen cupboards. She turned the faucet on and off.

She stood at the window over the sink and looked out at the crab apple tree, and then she turned around and looked at me.

“Whose house is this?” she asked.

“It could be yours,” I said. “If you want it. With your farm money. You’d be right next door to us. You could have your own kitchen again.”

She was quiet a long time. Then she asked, “Would I have to bake for Curt?”

Arlene laughed so hard she had to sit down. Helen did not laugh. She was serious.

“Only if you want to,” I said.

“I want to,” Helen said. “He likes the date bars. He always did. He’d eat the whole pan if I let him.”

I asked her again, plainly, whether she wanted to spend her farm money on this house, and she said yes. I asked her a third time on the drive back, fifty feet, and she said, “Robin, I said yes twice already. Are you deaf or are you a lawyer?”

That was the old Helen. That was the Helen who sold her own cattle at the sale barn in Morris and made the auctioneer start over because he had her weights wrong.

Telling Curt

Arlene sold the house to Helen for sixty-eight thousand dollars. It was a fair price for the town, maybe a little low, because Arlene wanted the peonies kept and said so.

The bank in Glenwood handled the closing. I signed as Helen’s attorney in fact, and Helen signed too, slow and shaky, right below me.

The house was titled in Helen’s name. Every dollar came out of Helen’s account. I kept the closing papers and the receipts in the green folder, and I started a ledger in the back of it in pencil, the way my mother kept her egg money.

The other twelve thousand went to fixing it for her. A carpenter from church put grab bars in the bathroom and tore out the tub for a walk-in shower with a seat.

I bought knob covers for the stove and a lock for the basement door. I hired Kim Peterson, a retired aide I used to work with, to sit with Helen the two afternoons she was not at the senior center, and paid her out of Helen’s Social Security.

I meant to tell Curt the day I signed. I had the words ready. But he was on the road all that week writing seed orders, home after dark and gone before six, and every night I opened my mouth and he was already asleep.

That is not an excuse. I should have told him. I have thought about it a lot since.

He found out the Saturday before the move, when I asked him to help me carry Helen’s bed across the yard.