The Camper on the Eighty That Was Mine

Christmas

On the Sunday before Christmas, about four in the afternoon, I heard a truck in the lane, and then children.

Darrin had brought both kids down. Hannah was carrying a paper sack, and Sam was carrying a little potted pine with one red bow on it.

“It’s a Christmas tree,” Sam told me gravely, holding it up with both arms. “For a camper.”

They came in, and we put the tree on the fold-down table, and I made cocoa on the little propane stove.

Darrin sat on the edge of my bed with his knees practically up to his chin and watched the three of us.

When the kids were busy with the marshmallows, he cleared his throat.

“There’s a little house in town,” he said. “East side, two blocks from the Methodist church. Two bedrooms, all on one floor. The Andersons are going into the care center after the first of the year, and their kids want to sell it to somebody they know instead of listing it.”

I did not say anything. I waited, the way I used to wait for a fourth grader to work out the rest of the problem on his own.

“I talked to their son,” Darrin said. “It’s priced fair. More than fair. It’s got a new roof, but the furnace is old, and the bathroom’s no good for somebody your age, with that tub. I can put in a new furnace myself. I can put in a walk-in shower. I’ve done both for Crystal’s folks.”

“Darrin,” I said.

“I know you can buy it yourself,” he said quickly.

“I know you don’t need me. But I want to do the work, Marlene. I want you warm. I want you close to the clinic and the church. And I don’t want my kids growing up thinking this is how a Houck treats his people.”

He looked down at the floor between his boots. “Would you take it? The little house in town? If I help?”

I looked at him a long time. Then I looked at Hannah, who had gone very still at the table with her cocoa, pretending not to listen and listening with her whole body.

The drawing

Before I could answer, Hannah got down from the bench and took a folded piece of paper out of her paper sack and set it on the table in front of me.

“I made you this,” she said. “For your camper. In case you move away from it.”

It was a drawing in colored pencil. It was my camper, under three big oaks, with smoke curling out of the furnace pipe and cows standing in the snow beside it.

There was a woman at the window with white hair and glasses, waving.

Across the top, in her crooked letters, she had written Grandma Marlenes House. She had left out the apostrophe. I have never corrected it, and I never will.

At the bottom, very small, she had drawn two more people walking down the lane toward the camper.

One was tall and one was little. Underneath them she had written, Me and Dad coming to visit.

I did not cry in front of them. I want that on the record.

I waited until they had gone back up the lane in the dark, Sam asleep over his father’s shoulder, and then I sat at that little table with the drawing and cried like a baby for half an hour.