Eleven Keys Under the Christmas Tree

How we got the house

I should explain how a twenty-eight-year-old electrician and a twenty-seven-year-old nurse ended up owning a two-story house on a corner lot in Lake Mills, Iowa, with a wraparound porch and a hundred years of Halvorsen Christmases soaked into the wallpaper.

It started with my grandpa. He farmed a hundred and sixty acres west of Thompson his whole life, and the spring before, at eighty-four, he finally sold it and moved into a little apartment in Forest City.

He split part of the money among his grandkids while he was alive to see it used.

“I’d rather watch you build something than have you fight over it at my funeral,” he told me, sitting at his kitchen table with his coffee.

My share was $180,000. I had never seen a number like that next to my name. I sat in my truck in his driveway afterward for twenty minutes, just holding the check and not starting the engine.

Jordyn and I had already picked out a lot north of town, out past the edge of the subdivision where the corn starts.

We had a builder in Mason City drawing up a plan for a little ranch house with a basement.

That was the plan in September. Then Jordyn told her folks about Grandpa’s gift at Sunday dinner, because Jordyn tells her folks everything, and by the next Sunday her father had a different plan for us.

He laid it out at their kitchen table with a yellow legal pad. His mother, Agnes, was eighty-nine. She had fallen twice that summer, and the stairs in the old house had finally beaten her.

She needed assisted living, and assisted living in our part of Iowa runs about five thousand dollars a month.

Her savings would not stretch forever. The house had to be sold, and Curt could not afford to buy it himself.

“A realtor says we’d get a hundred and seventy for it,” he said.

“Some couple from Des Moines would buy it for a weekend place and tear out Dad’s built-ins. Or you two buy it from Mom for ninety, and it stays ours.”

He did not say “yours.” He said “ours.” I noticed it, and I let it go, because Jordyn had tears in her eyes and her hand was already on my arm under the table.

She had grown up in that house almost as much as her own. She learned to make lefse in that kitchen.

She had her fifth birthday party on that porch. Her grandpa taught her to ride a bike on that sidewalk.

“Ethan,” she said in the truck on the way home, “I know it’s a lot of old house. I know the wiring is probably a disaster. But I can’t stand the thought of strangers in Grandma’s kitchen.”

“The wiring is definitely a disaster,” I said, and she laughed for the first time all afternoon. That was when I knew we were going to buy it, and honestly I wanted to.