The Spotless House We Left Behind

The letter

We could have told her parents. I asked Natalie about it more than once, lying awake in the basement, listening to Gordon’s footsteps overhead.

“If I tell Mom now,” Natalie said, “it becomes the only thing anybody talks about until they leave. Britt will think I’m doing it to ruin her trip. Mom will cry. Dad will go out to the garage.”

“And if you don’t tell them?”

“Then Britt gets her trip,” she said. “And Mom and Dad come home to a clean house and the truth, written down, so nobody can interrupt it.”

I didn’t argue. I think she was right. She knew her family better than I did, and she had been interrupted her whole life.

So she wrote a letter. It took her three weeks. She wrote it longhand at the little desk in the basement, after supper, after the dishes, while I watched the ballgame with the sound down.

I didn’t read it until much later. She didn’t ask me to.

The only person we told was Wade. Natalie felt that was fair. He was going to be home alone with three kids while his wife was in England, and Faye’s chart already had his family down for supper at the Lindahls’ every night those two weeks, with Natalie cooking.

We went over to their house the Thursday night before the trip, after Brittany had gone to bed. Wade sat on his back step with a can of pop and listened to the whole thing without saying a word.

When Natalie was done, he rubbed the back of his neck.

“I’m not going to say anything to Britt,” he said. “Let her have her trip. She needs it more than you know.”

“I figured,” Natalie said.

“And I’m not going to pretend I’m surprised.” He looked out at his yard, where the kids’ bikes were lying in the grass. “I’ve been watching you do our dishes for two years, Nat. I should have said something. I’m sorry.”

I liked Wade more that night than I ever had. He wasn’t a bad man. He was a tired one, gone sixteen hours a day pouring concrete, and he’d let his mother-in-law fill the hole he left. Plenty of men would have done the same.

“I’ll leave you a hotdish,” Natalie told him. “Tater tot. The kids like that one.”

He laughed. “I can boil noodles, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “But Owen likes the tater tot.”

The morning they flew

Their flight left Sioux Falls at six in the morning, through Chicago to London. Gordon loaded the suitcases into the trunk at four fifteen, and I heard him from the basement, grunting over Faye’s big blue one.

At four thirty the garage door went up, and then it came down, and then the house was quiet.

Natalie was already awake. She was lying on her side looking at the ceiling. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

By seven, two guys from my shop, Ray and his nephew, were carrying our bed frame up the basement stairs. Ray had taken a personal day for it. He wouldn’t take gas money. He said his own mother-in-law had once made him sleep on a cot in her sewing room for a month, and he had been waiting thirty years for somebody to help.

We didn’t have much. A bed. A dresser. Two lamps. Boxes of clothes and dishes we’d been given at our wedding and never unpacked, because Faye’s kitchen didn’t have room for them.

We were out by noon.

And then we cleaned.