The Little White House Next Door

“Took it back to Hutchinson Friday after my shift,” he said. “The dealer bought it back. Not for what I paid. I lost a little over six thousand on it, between what they gave me and what I still owed.”

He reached in his back pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. “I put the rest back in savings yesterday morning. Kim helped me.”

He held it out. It was a deposit slip, my bank’s, with Kim’s initials on it. Twenty-three thousand eight hundred and forty dollars, into the joint savings.

“It’s about six short,” he said. “I know. I’ll make up the six. It’ll take me a while, but I’ll make it up, out of my check, the same as I was going to make the payment.”

I stood there holding the slip. I did not know what to say, so for a while I did not say anything.

“Your mama told me about your dad and the boat,” Dennis said.

He looked down at his boots. “I’ve been thinking about it every night for three weeks. I never told you about Dad and the Corvettes at the lot in Hutch. Did I ever tell you that?”

“You told me once. A long time ago.”

“I turned forty-nine and all I could think was three years,” he said. “Three years till I’m as old as he was, and he never had one thing. I thought if I had one thing, I wouldn’t end up like him.”

He swallowed. “And then I was sitting in that car at lunch every day at the plant by myself. And I figured out I was ending up like him anyway. Alone in a vehicle, eating a sandwich.”

“Dennis.”

“Brooke wouldn’t ride in it,” he said. “My own girl. She walked nine blocks every Saturday in July so she wouldn’t have to sit in it. That’s when I knew. That car wasn’t worth one Saturday of her walking.”

His voice went, then. He pressed the heel of his hand against one eye, hard, the way men do when they would rather nobody saw.

I did not say anything. I let him have it.

“I’m not asking you to come home,” he said, when he could. “I know you’re not ready. I just saw the paint by the door last time I came for the kids, and I figured you’d start today. I’d like to help, if that’s all right. That’s all I came for.”

I looked at him a long time. I thought about the kitchen table at the farm, and his hand on mine.

I thought about my daddy standing in a yard in Sterling in 1978, saying “I sold it, Mar,” and nothing else.

“The rails are white,” I said. “The floor is gray. Don’t mix them up.”

He let out a breath like he had been holding it since June. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and he went to the pickup and started pulling out drop cloths.

Behind me, I heard Mama’s screen door open and close. When she came back out, she had a third coffee mug.

She walked down her steps and around the end of the fence in her housecoat and slippers, and she handed it to Dennis without a word.

He took it with both hands. “Thank you, Marilyn.”

“Rails first,” Mama said. “Then the floor. Or you’ll paint yourself into a corner.” And she went back to her side of the fence.