The Spotless House We Left Behind

Two weeks

The two weeks the Lindahls were in England were the best two weeks of our marriage up to then.

Natalie cooked for two people. She made the things she liked to make, the things there had never been enough of for nine. Shrimp one night. A little pan of lasagna. Pancakes for supper on a Friday, because she could.

I came home from the shop and sat on the bad porch steps, on the left side where the stringer still held, and drank a cold pop and watched the corn grow in the field across the road.

We bought two kitchen chairs at a farm auction outside Garretson for six dollars. We hung the curtains her grandma had made, that had been sitting in a box for three years.

Wade sent Natalie one text that first week. It was a picture of his kitchen sink, piled to the faucet with dishes, and Owen standing on a chair beside it with a dish towel. Under it he’d written, “Hotdish was a hit. Owen says thank you. He’s drying.”

Natalie looked at that picture for a long time. Then she sent back a heart.

From England, we heard nothing. Faye posted pictures on Facebook every day. Big Ben. A red bus. Brittany in front of the cottage, standing by a stone wall with roses climbing up it, the very one she’d shown us on her phone at the island that morning.

Natalie liked every single picture. I asked her why.

“Because she looks happy,” Natalie said. “I wanted her to be happy. I just didn’t want to pay for it with my whole life.”

The phone call

They landed in Sioux Falls on a Saturday night in late June. We knew because Faye posted a picture from the airport: three tired faces under the arrivals sign, with the words, “Home sweet home!”

Natalie didn’t sleep much that night. Neither did I.

We figured Faye would call Saturday night, the minute she walked in and saw the letter. She didn’t. We figured Gordon would drive out Sunday morning. He didn’t.

Sunday evening, Natalie was at the old porcelain sink washing our two supper plates. I was drying. A thunderstorm was building out west, and the air had gone still and heavy the way it does before a South Dakota storm, and the light had turned green over the shelterbelt.

Her phone lit up on the counter.

Mom.

Natalie looked at me. She dried her hands on the towel I was holding. She let it ring three times. Then she picked it up and put it on speaker and set it on the counter between us.

“Natalie,” Faye said. “I read your letter.”

There was a long quiet. I could hear Faye breathing. I could hear the refrigerator humming in her kitchen, ten miles away.

“I read it twice,” Faye said. “I sat at the island and read it twice. Then I went downstairs, and the carpet still had the lines in it from the shampooer. And I came back up, and I looked at that chart.”

Natalie didn’t say anything. She held onto the edge of the sink.

“You checked off every box,” Faye said. Her voice broke on it. “Every box. Through the end of the month. And I stood there, and I thought, I made my own daughter a chart.”