Dad’s Martin Houses Go Back Up

Darlene

At twenty after ten, a car door shut up in the lot.

I turned around, and it was Darlene.

My sister is three years younger than me and four inches shorter and she has never once in twenty-eight years raised her voice at her husband in public. She is the peacemaker. At Thanksgiving she is the one who changes the subject. When we were girls, she was the one who cried when I got a spanking.

She was walking down from the lot with her purse still on her shoulder and her car keys still in her hand. She did not look at me. She did not look at Dad.

She walked straight past the three white houses and the fourth one on the sawhorses, and straight down the slope to the ramp, where Kyle was coming back up the dock with the bow line coiled over his shoulder.

I found out later how she knew. Saturday morning, the wife of the older fellow in the lot had called Darlene to ask if Thurman was feeling all right, because her husband had seen me and Ozzie putting the houses back up and wondered why they had ever come down.

So Darlene asked Kyle at the breakfast table why Daddy’s houses had been down.

And Kyle told her.

He told her the truth, I will give him that. He told her the birds were ruining the boat and he had taken care of it.

She did not say a word to him at the table. She cleared the dishes. She went and put on her shoes. And then she drove to the lake.

She stopped at the edge of the ramp, where the concrete meets the water. Kyle stopped on the dock about fifteen feet away from her.

The whole lake was quiet. The ducks had even quit fussing at Ozzie. The only sound was the martins over our heads.

Darlene took a breath.

“Kyle,” she said.

She did not yell. But my sister has a voice that carries. She sang alto in the choir for twenty years, and she knows how to fill a room without shouting.

“Kyle, does a boat cover cost less than my father’s fifty years?”

The men on the bank heard it. The fellow by the tailgate heard it. Ozzie, down by the pond, heard it and turned around with his bread bag in his hand.

Kyle stood there on the dock with the rope over his shoulder.

He did not answer for a long time.

“Darlene,” he said finally, low.