The Little House Next Door

Saturdays

He did not make a speech after that. Curt is not a speech man. He just started showing up.

That afternoon he raked her whole yard, every leaf, and bagged them and hauled them to the compost site.

Helen stood at the window in her housecoat and watched him and said, “He couldn’t stand a leaf on the grass. Just like his father.”

The next weekend he mowed her lawn one last time before the snow, short, the way you are supposed to in the fall so the grass does not mat.

He put her garden hose away and blew out her outdoor faucet and wrapped the peonies in burlap the way Arlene had shown me.

And on Saturday mornings, he started taking her to the cafe on Main. Every Saturday, nine o’clock. He would walk across the yard and knock on her door, and she would come out in her good wool coat over her housecoat, and he would help her into the truck.

The old farmers at the long table in the back would nod at them. One of them told Curt one Saturday, “Your dad would be glad to see this, Curt.”

Curt nodded and said, “I know he would,” and kept cutting his mother’s pancakes.

Some Saturdays Helen knew exactly who everybody was and told the farmers what they were doing wrong with their corn.

Some Saturdays she asked Curt three times where they were. He answered her three times, the same way, patiently. “We’re at the cafe, Ma. You’re having pancakes.”

I asked him once, on a Sunday night in November, whether it was hard. Whether it was the thing he had been afraid of.

He was sitting at our kitchen table cleaning his deer rifle for the opener. He thought about it.

“It’s hard,” he said. “Some days it’s real hard. She asked me last week if Dad was coming home for supper.”

“What did you say?”

“I said not tonight.” He ran the patch through the barrel. “But it’s not the same as before. Before, I was nineteen and alone and I didn’t know anything. Now I’ve got you. Now she’s got her own kitchen. Now I’m not standing in a hallway.”

He set the rifle down.

“I was going to miss it, Robin,” he said. “All of it. The good days too. I was going to put her somewhere and visit on Sundays and miss every one of the good days because I was scared of the bad ones.”