Two Hams for Grandma’s Wake

“She asked me not to,” I said quietly, from the sink. “The day she sold me the house. She made me promise. I’ve painted that kitchen twice. I taped around it both times.”

Dot reached out and touched one of the lines with one finger. It said Joanie 1978, way up near the top, the last one.

Joan was Amber’s mother. She had died of cancer at fifty, fourteen years ago. Ida had taken it harder than anything, Amber always said, harder even than Walt.

“Joanie was sixteen,” Dot said. “That’s the year she got her license. She drove Ida’s Buick into the ditch on County C the first week.”

She started laughing and crying at the same time. “Oh, Ida was so mad.”

I went back to the dishes and let them have it, the two of them, standing at the pantry door in the kitchen where they grew up.

It didn’t belong to me, that moment. I just kept the water running.

When I looked up a little while later, Glen was standing in the kitchen doorway. I don’t know how long he had been there. He wasn’t looking at me or at his aunts.

He was looking at the pantry door, at his own name written there in his mother’s hand, over and over, from the time he was four years old.

He didn’t say a word. After a minute he turned around and went out the back door onto the porch, without his coat, into the cold.

I gave it a few minutes. Then I poured coffee in one of Ida’s wheat cups and took it out to him. He was standing at the porch rail looking at the backyard under the snow.

I handed him the coffee. He took it without looking at me and held it in both hands.

We stood there for a while. The cold came right through my henley, and I didn’t go back in.

“I was supposed to get this house,” Glen said finally. He said it to the yard, not to me.

“Dad always said so. Since I was a kid. The farm went to my cousin and the house was going to go to me.”

“I know,” I said.

“When Mom fell, I had a boy at Stout and another one getting married, and Pam’s back surgery that the insurance wouldn’t cover, and I didn’t have it.”

He took a sip of coffee. “Ninety-six thousand dollars. I couldn’t scrape together a down payment. My own mother’s house, and I couldn’t buy it.”

He turned the cup in his hands. “So she sold it to Joanie’s girl and her husband, and fine. That was family. I could live with that. Then you two split up.”

He finally looked at me. “And you got to keep it. The man who isn’t even family anymore lives in my mother’s house. Do you know what that’s like?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. I’m sorry, Glen. I can see how it looks.”

He looked back out at the yard. I didn’t say anything else for a while.

A man doesn’t need a speech when he’s hurting. He needs somebody to stand next to him in the cold and not leave.

But after a while, I told him one thing, because I thought he ought to know it. “Your mom called me every October,” I said.

“Every single year, even after the divorce. She’d say, Nicholas, did you check the furnace? And I’d tell her yes, Ida, I checked it. And she’d say good. She just wanted to know her house was warm.”