Two Hams for Grandma’s Wake

Glen Lange called me on the twenty-second of December, while I was flat on my back under a furnace in a farmhouse basement outside Marshfield with a flashlight in my teeth. I almost let it go to voicemail.

He didn’t say hello. Glen hadn’t said hello to me in two years.

He said, “We’re having Mom’s lunch at Grandma’s house after the funeral. The twenty-sixth. You’ll need to clear out by ten and stay gone till six.”

I sat up too fast and cracked my head on the cold air return. The farmer’s wife, a woman named Kim who had been watching me from the basement stairs, winced for me.

I held up one finger to her and took the flashlight out of my mouth.

“Glen, I’m sorry about Ida,” I said. “Amber called me this morning. I was going to stop by the funeral home tonight and sign the book.”

“So you know,” he said, like that was a mark against both of us. “Pam will have food brought in. We’ll be out by six. Leave the key under the mat and take the boy somewhere.”

Take the boy somewhere. My son. Out of my house. I looked up at the furnace I’d just opened, at the hairline crack in the heat exchanger I was going to have to explain to Kim, and I thought this was a day for bad news all around.

“Let me think about it, Glen,” I said, keeping my voice as even as I could manage with my head ringing.

“There’s nothing to think about,” he said. “It’s Grandma’s house.” Then the line went dead, and I sat there on the concrete with the flashlight in my lap and Kim asking if I was all right.

I told her I was fine. Then I told her about the heat exchanger, set her up with two space heaters from my van, and put her on the schedule for a new furnace.

Ida Lange was ninety-three years old. She had been born in the house on Mill Street, the old two-story with the porch and the wood trim inside that nobody in a hundred years had ever dared to paint.

Her father built the pantry shelves. Her mother died in the front bedroom.

She married Walt Lange in the parlor of that house in 1957, raised Glen and his sister Joan in it, buried Walt from it, and kept living there alone until she was eighty-five and fell on the basement stairs one February morning.

After that fall, her doctor said no more stairs, and Ida said she would go to Riverview if the house went to somebody who would love it.

Amber and I had been married three years then. We were renting a tired little duplex near the feed mill, and Amber was pregnant with Owen, and every month we were saving for a place of our own.

Ida offered us the house for ninety-six thousand dollars, which was less than it was worth even then.

She needed the money for Riverview, and she said she would rather take less and know who was sleeping under her roof.

The down payment was twenty thousand dollars, and every cent of it was mine. I’d been putting money back since I was nineteen and working summers on a roofing crew.

The mortgage was in both our names, but Amber worked part-time at the clinic and her checks went to groceries and day care.

My checks made the house payments. They made them for eight years.