The Little White House Next Door

Coffee across the fence

Every morning that summer, before I left for the bank, I took my coffee out to the backyard. And every morning Mama was already standing on her side of the chain-link fence with hers.

When I was small, Mama used to sit on her back step at sunup with her coffee, on that same side of that same fence.

She let me sit beside her with my own cup, which was mostly milk with one spoon of her coffee and two spoons of sugar.

We never talked much on that step. She would point out the robins in the grass.

She would tell me which of her tomatoes would be ripe first. Then she would say “Well,” and stand up, and the day would start.

That summer it was the same. Two grown women at a fence, one in a flowered housecoat and one in her bank clothes.

Some mornings we said nothing. Some mornings she told me about the tomatoes, which were coming in heavy.

One morning in late June she reached across the fence and fixed my collar, which was folded under on one side.

She did it without thinking, the way she did when I was seven and getting on the school bus. I had to look away so she would not see my face.

“You’re doing all right,” she said. “You hear me? You’re doing all right, Angela.”

I could not answer her. I just nodded into my coffee. She left her hand on my shoulder a second longer, and then she said “Well,” and went inside, and the day started.

Saturdays

Every Saturday morning Dennis came for the kids. He did not come in the Corvette. He walked.

It was nine blocks from the rental to the little white house, and he walked it in the heat every Saturday, and he knocked on the screen door like company.

I noticed that the first Saturday and did not say anything. I noticed it the second Saturday too.

By the third Saturday I understood that he did not want to park that car in front of my mother’s house, and that was the first thing all summer that made me want to cry for him instead of at him.

Cody went every week and came home sunburned and full of talk. They went fishing at the lake. They put a new chain on the push mower at the rental.

Once, Dennis let him sit behind the wheel of the Corvette in the empty co-op lot, engine off, and Cody talked about it for three days.

Brooke went every week too, because I asked her to and because she loves her father.

But she would not ride in the car. She told him so the first Saturday, on my porch, with her arms crossed.

“I’ll walk,” she said. “I’ll meet you there. I don’t want to ride in it, Dad.”

“Brookie, it’s just a car.”

“It’s my nursing school,” she said. She did not say it mean.

She said it the way you would say what time it was. “It’s my nursing school and Cody’s first truck. I can’t sit in it.”

Dennis stood on the porch with his hands hanging at his sides. He did not argue with her.

He nodded, and they walked to the rental side by side, nine blocks, not touching, and I watched them go until they turned at the corner by the Lutheran church.