The Apron I Took to My Brother

The sale

I should tell you how we got to that morning.

Dad died fourteen months before the sale. Heart attack, at seventy-six, in the shop behind the house, with a chainsaw carburetor half rebuilt on his bench.

Mom found him when she carried his dinner plate out because he had not come in.

He ran a small-engine repair business out of that shop for more than forty years. Mowers, tillers, chainsaws, weed eaters, the occasional outboard motor from somebody who fished the White River. Half of Independence County had a machine he had fixed.

Mom stayed in the house alone through one winter and most of a summer.

Then in August she slipped on the back steps carrying a laundry basket, and she lay on the grass for almost an hour before the mail carrier saw her.

I am a mail carrier myself, down in Conway, so that one hit me hard. I know exactly what that man saw from his truck window, because I have seen it twice on my own route.

She cracked her wrist and bruised her hip, and when the doctor in Batesville told her she ought not to be out on that place alone anymore, she did not argue. That told me more than the X-rays did.

We found her a one-bedroom unit in a senior apartment building on the north side of Batesville, near the Walmart, with a bus to church on Sundays and a nurse who comes by twice a week.

The deposit was six hundred and fifty dollars, due the first of the month.

The house sold faster than any of us expected. A young couple from Searcy bought it, a lineman and a schoolteacher with two little boys. They wanted the shop emptied out so he could park his bass boat in it.

So it fell to me to empty a house where my parents had lived for forty-four years. My wife, Dixie, took two weeks of vacation from the dentist’s office to help.

Our son, Rollo, who is twelve, carried boxes and complained the whole time and worked harder than either of us.

Webb lives in Cave City, about twenty minutes up the highway. He is forty-seven, six years older than me. He worked nineteen years at the chicken plant in Batesville, and his wife, Dolly, does the books for a tractor dealer.

I called him in early September to ask what he wanted out of the house and the shop. I said I would set aside anything he named before Dixie and I started pricing.

“Sell it,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“Nothing? Not even Dad’s tools?”

“Sell it, Brandon. I don’t need any of it. Get Mom what she can.”

He hung up before I could ask him anything else. I remember standing in our driveway in Conway, looking at the phone, thinking that was a strange thing to say about tools Dad used to tell us he would leave to us.

But Webb and I had not been close in years. He came to the funeral and stood by the casket and shook hands for two hours and did not cry.

He came to Mom’s for Christmas and left before the pie. I figured he had his own reasons and I did not have the energy to dig them out.

So I priced the shop.