The Little White House Next Door

Mama’s supper

In the middle of July, Mama called Dennis on the phone and asked him to come to supper.

She did not ask me first. She told me after she had done it, standing at the fence with her coffee.

“I’m feeding Dennis on Thursday,” she said. “You and the kids can eat at your own house that night.”

“Mama.”

“He’s been my son-in-law twenty-one years,” she said. “He’s going to eat at my table. You don’t have to like it.”

So on Thursday I watched out my kitchen window while Dennis walked up Mama’s steps in a clean shirt with his hair wet-combed, carrying a bag of sweet corn from the stand out on Highway 56.

He took his cap off at the door. He always did that for her.

They ate in her kitchen with the window open. I could not hear what they said and I did not try.

I could smell the meat loaf and I could hear the radio playing the Royals game low, and once I heard Dennis laugh, and once I heard nothing for a long time.

He stayed until almost ten. When he came out he stood on her porch a minute in the dark, looking over at my house. Then he went down the steps and walked home.

The next morning at the fence I asked her. “What did you talk about?”

“Your daddy,” Mama said. “And a boat.”

1978

I had never heard the story. Mama told it to me that morning across the fence, while the sprinklers ticked and the tomatoes sweated in the early sun, and she told it plainly, the way she tells everything.

In 1978, before I was born, she and Daddy had saved three thousand dollars for a down payment on a house in town.

It took them four years. She took in ironing and he worked weekends at the sale barn, and every dollar went into a passbook at the bank.

“And one Saturday your daddy came home pulling a bass boat,” she said. “A green and silver one, with a trailer and a motor. He’d seen it at a place in Great Bend and he paid for it out of the passbook. Twenty-six hundred dollars.”

“Daddy did that?” I could not picture it. My daddy wore the same three shirts for twenty years and kept his receipts in a shoebox.

“Your daddy did that. His own father worked himself to death on the farm and never once went fishing. Your daddy was twenty-eight and scared of turning into him.”

She drank her coffee. “I went to my sister’s in Sterling. I stayed three weeks.”

“What happened?”

“He sold it. Lost six hundred dollars on it. Drove to Sterling in that old Ford and stood in my sister’s yard and didn’t make a speech. He just said, ‘I sold it, Mar.’ And I got in the truck.”

She looked up at her own back door. “We bought this house with what was left, the next spring. You came along a year after.”

“Is that what you told Dennis?”

“That’s what I told him.” She set her mug on the fence post. “And I told him the boat wasn’t the thing. The boat was never the thing. It was being afraid. Your daddy had to figure out what he was afraid of before he could come get me.”

“What did Dennis say?”

“He didn’t say much,” she said. “Men don’t, at my table. But he ate two helpings of meat loaf and he cried a little over the pie, and I let him. That’s all I’m going to tell you, Angela. The rest is his to tell.”