The Farmhouse Down the Road

Ivy was eight that September. She came in from the backyard with grass stains on both knees and a question she had carried all the way across the lawn between our two houses.

“Mom, why do we pay Grandpa?” she asked. “Jack says they don’t pay him anything. Jack says Grandpa told him their house is theirs.”

I was standing at the sink with my hands in the dishwater. Through the window I could see the swing set, and my nephew Jack still out there swinging alone, his sneakers dragging two ruts in the dirt.

“Who told you we pay Grandpa?” I asked her. It was a coward’s answer, and Ivy knew it, because she was eight and nobody’s fool.

“You put the check on his fridge,” she said. “Under the tractor magnet. Every single month. I’ve seen you do it.”

She was right. On the first of every month for two years, I had driven into town to Dad’s place and slid a check for seven hundred dollars under the little green tractor magnet on his refrigerator. I was never late once.

I dried my hands and told her it was grown-up business, and she went off to find her brother. Then I stood at that sink a long time, looking at the house next door, the one exactly like mine.

Dad had bought the two houses back in the nineties, on a dead-end street at the edge of Millersburg where the town gives up and the corn starts.

Same builder, same floor plan, same little concrete porch, same gutter that leaked over the back door.

For twenty years he rented them to strangers. He did the repairs himself on Saturdays, with a coffee can of screws and a level that had been his father’s.

It was his retirement, he always said. The houses were going to take care of him.

Then my marriage ended, and two years ago I moved into the left house with Ivy and Theo, and a few months later my brother’s marriage ended too, and Seth moved into the right house with his boy.

Two single parents. Two identical houses. Two kids’ bikes in each yard. And until Ivy came in from the swing set, I had honestly believed we were both writing the same check.

I’m a unit clerk at the hospital in Millersburg. I answer the phones on the medical floor, I keep the charts moving, I chase down doctors who don’t want to be chased. I make about seventeen dollars an hour and I’m good at it.

The kids’ father lived in Columbus by then. His support came when it came, which was most months but not all of them. That seven hundred dollars was close to a third of what I brought home after taxes.

I had never once complained about it. It was below what the house would have rented for to a stranger, and I knew that, and I was grateful. I thought Dad was giving me a break. I thought he was giving us both one.

That Sunday I went to Dad’s for dinner the way we always did.

Seth was working a weekend shift at the lumber yard, so it was just Dad and me and the kids, and the pot roast he makes every Sunday the same way Mom used to make it.

After supper the kids went to the living room to watch a movie, and I stayed at the kitchen table with him while he poured his coffee. I didn’t plan what I said. I just said it.