The Little House Next Door

Curt sat on the edge of the bed and did not move. I put my hand on his back. I could feel him shaking under the t-shirt.

“She sang that to me,” he said. “When I was little. Every night. In Swedish, because her own mother sang it to her. I didn’t know what the words meant until I was ten. I thought it was just her song.”

“What do they mean?” I asked.

He was quiet a long time. On the monitor Helen kept singing.

“It’s about how nobody is safer than God’s children,” he said. “Not the birds in the trees. Not the stars. Nobody.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“She sang it to Dad too,” he said. “At the end. In the county home. I’d come in after milking and she’d be sitting there holding his hand singing it, and he didn’t know who she was anymore, and she sang it anyway. Every night. I used to wait in the hall until she was done because I couldn’t stand to go in.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing I needed to say.

“I thought I was protecting myself,” he said. “Putting her somewhere. I thought if I didn’t see it, it wouldn’t happen. I wasn’t even thinking about her. I was thinking about me in that hallway.”

On the screen Helen finished the verse and lay back down. She tucked the pillow under her head. She said something to the dark that I could not make out, and then she was quiet, and in a minute we could hear her breathing, slow and even.

Curt sat there holding the monitor until the sound clicked off. Then he set it back on my nightstand, very carefully, so the little green light faced the bed.

He lay down beside me. Not on the couch. Beside me, for the first time in three weeks. He put his arm over me and his face in the back of my neck, and he did not say anything else, and neither did I.

I do not think he slept. I know I did not.

Eggs

When I woke up at six, his side of the bed was empty and cold.

I went to the kitchen. No coffee. I went to the living room. No Curt on the couch. His truck was still in the driveway. His boots were gone from the mat.

I looked out the kitchen window, across the yard, past the crab apple tree. The light was on in Helen’s kitchen. There was a shape at the stove.

I put my cardigan on over my nightgown and walked across the frosted grass in my slippers.

The leaves crunched. My breath came out white. I went up the one step and opened her back door very quietly.

Curt was standing at his mother’s stove in his quarter-zip and his sweatpants, with a spatula in his hand, making eggs.

He had taken the knob cover off the front burner and set it neatly on the counter. There was coffee in her old percolator. There was toast.

Helen was sitting at her kitchen table in her blue housecoat with her hands folded, watching him, smiling the way she smiled at the geranium.

“Scrambled,” she was saying. “Not too dry. Your father always cooked them too dry.”

“I know, Ma,” Curt said. “I know how you like them.”

He put the plate in front of her. He poured her coffee and put two spoons of sugar in it without asking, because he knew.

Then he sat down across from her with his own cup.

Helen took a bite. She chewed. She looked at him over her fork.

“These are good, Buddy,” she said.

I stopped in the doorway. Nobody had called Curt Buddy in forty years. It was what she called him when he was a boy, when he was small enough to ride in the tractor cab on her lap.

His father called him Bud. I had only ever heard it in stories.

Curt did not correct her. He did not look at me. He looked at his mother.

“Thanks, Ma,” he said. “Eat your toast.”

“You eat yours,” she said. “You’re too skinny. Robin doesn’t feed you.”

“Robin feeds me fine,” he said, and finally he looked up at me in the doorway, and his eyes were red, and he smiled.

It was a small smile. But it was the first one I had seen in three weeks.

“Sit down,” he said to me. “I’ll make you some. I’m getting good at it.”

I sat down at Helen’s table. Curt made me eggs. They were too dry. I ate every bite.