The Little House Next Door

He stood in our spare room with his hands on the footboard and looked at me.

“Across the yard where?” he said.

“To Arlene’s,” I said. “It’s Helen’s house now. She bought it. I bought it for her, with her money, as her power of attorney. It’s all in the folder. You can read every page.”

He did not say anything for a long time. I could hear the furnace kick on. It was the first cold morning of the fall.

“That was the lake money,” he said finally. His voice was very low.

“That was your mother’s money,” I said. “I didn’t spend a dollar of it on me. I didn’t spend a dollar of it on you. I spent it on her. That’s the only thing I’m allowed to spend it on, Curt. That’s the job she gave me.”

“You could have asked me.”

“You didn’t ask her,” I said. I said it gently. I did not say it to win. I said it because it was true and we both knew it.

He looked at the footboard. Then he picked up his end of the bed. We carried it down the hall, out the back door, across the grass and up the one step into the little white house, and he set it down where I pointed, and he went home without a word.

Moving day

We moved her on the last Sunday of September. It was one of those Minnesota fall afternoons that feel like a gift you did not earn, bright and still, the maples gone yellow and the leaves coming down all over the lawn between the two houses whether anybody raked them or not.

Helen insisted on wearing her blue housecoat and her slippers. I tried to get her into slacks and a sweater.

She looked at me like I had suggested she move in a ball gown.

“It’s my house,” she said. “I’ll wear what I want in my own house.”

So I put on my old cardigan and took her by the arm. In her two hands she carried a little potted geranium, the one that had sat on her farm kitchen windowsill for as long as I had known her.

She had carried it from the farm to our spare room in the spring and she was going to carry it fifty more feet herself.

In my other hand I had the baby monitor, the white one, still with the twist tie around the cord.

I had bought it at the Walmart in Alexandria, the kind with a camera and a little screen and a two-way talk button.

Curt was on our porch. He had on his quarter-zip, the one the seed company gave him at the winter meeting, and he stood with one hand on the porch rail and watched us cross the yard.

He did not come down the steps. He did not help. He did not go inside either. He just stood there and watched us go, and I have never in twenty-nine years seen him look at me the way he looked at me that afternoon.

It was not anger. I could have handled anger. It was something closer to fear.

Helen did not see him. She was looking at the leaves.

“Look at all that gold,” she said. “Elmer would have had them raked by now. He couldn’t stand a leaf on the grass.”

“Curt’s the same,” I said.

“Curt’s like his father,” she said. “He was always like his father.” And she patted my hand on her arm like I was the one who needed comforting.

We went up the one step and inside. Helen walked straight to the kitchen and set her geranium on the windowsill over the sink.

She turned it so the best leaves faced out. Then she stood back and looked at it, and then she looked around at the little kitchen, the yellow curtains Arlene had left, the table I had brought over from our basement.

“Is this mine?” she asked me.

“All of it,” I said.

She put both hands over her mouth. Her eyes filled up. She was eighty-four years old and she had lived in our spare room for five months, in a borrowed bed, using a borrowed bathroom, saying excuse me in the hallway like a guest. And now she had a kitchen.

“I haven’t had a kitchen since April,” she said.

I held her. She smelled like Jergens lotion and the geranium. I cried too. I am not ashamed of it.

We stood in that kitchen and cried like two fools while the leaves came down outside the window.