The Camper on the Eighty That Was Mine

Darrin set the second suitcase down beside the first one, very carefully, the way you set down something that belongs to somebody else.

Then he straightened up in his brown canvas work jacket and could not quite look at me.

I was standing on the porch in my lilac vest with my purse in my hand.

I had been on my way to the grocery store in Corning for a ham loaf and a sack of potatoes. It was a Thursday afternoon in October, the week after my seventieth birthday.

“Crystal’s folks are coming to live with us, Marlene,” he said. “Dale and Bonnie lost their rental in Creston. The man sold it out from under them, and they’ve got nowhere to go.”

I looked at the suitcases. They were the two I took to Branson the year Harlan and I went down with the church bus.

Somebody had packed them. I could see a sleeve of my blue cardigan caught in the zipper of the first one.

“We need the house,” Darrin said. “The four of us and the two of them. It’s the only place big enough, and I can’t keep paying rent in town and a note out here both. You’ve got your pension. You’ve got somewhere to go.”

He said it like he had practiced it in the truck on the way over. I suppose he had.

Darrin was never a man who could say a hard thing without saying it to the windshield first.

The big maple in the yard was dropping yellow leaves on the gravel. Harlan planted that tree the year Darrin was born.

I remember thinking that the leaves did not know anything had changed, and that I envied them a little.

The house that was never mine

I should tell you how it was, so you understand why I did not argue with him, and why I did not pick up the phone and call anybody.

I married Harlan Houck when I was forty-eight years old. I had taught fourth grade in Corning for twenty-two years by then, and I had been a widow for six.

Harlan had lost his first wife, Ann, to cancer five years before we met.

Darrin was twenty-four when I married his father. He was polite to me from the first day, and he never once called me Mom, and I never once asked him to.

You do not ask that of a grown man whose mother is in the cemetery on the hill.

That house was Ann’s house. She picked the wallpaper in the front room and the red hens on the kitchen curtains.

When I moved in, I changed almost nothing, and what I did change I changed slowly, so nobody would feel it.

Harlan and I had twenty-one good years in it and one hard one. He had a stroke last April, out by the calving shed, with a heifer that was having trouble.

Lowell Peck found him. Lowell runs cattle across the blacktop and had come over to help pull the calf.

The calf lived. Harlan did not. He died two days later in the hospital in Omaha, with his hand in mine and Darrin asleep in the chair by the window, and I have never been sure he knew either of us was there.

Harlan’s will was simple. It had been written long before me and updated once, after we married, by Bill Dunn in Corning.

It left the house and all 240 acres to Darrin. It left me his pickup, his savings account, and a sentence about his love that I will keep to myself.

I was not surprised. Harlan and I had talked about it more than once.

The farm had been in the Houck name since 1911, and he wanted it to go to his son, and I agreed with him.

I had my own pension. I was not a woman who married for land.