The House I Bought Back for Dad

Dad called me at a quarter to ten on a Tuesday morning in September, and he said it the same way he used to report hail on the wheat. “Emmett, there’s a sign in my yard.”

I was running the county grader on a gravel road eleven miles north of Alliance, cutting the washboard out before the beet trucks started hauling.

I idled down, opened the cab door and asked him what kind of sign.

“The kind that says the house is for sale,” he said. “With a lady’s name on it and a phone number. It wasn’t here when I went to bed.”

I told him to stay inside and I’d be there in twenty minutes.

Then I called my foreman, told him it was family, and drove my pickup back to the county barn faster than I should have.

Dad lives on a quiet street on the east side of town, in a small yellow two-story house with an elm in the front yard and a sidewalk that heaves in two places where the roots got under it. He has lived there since 1971.

He was not inside when I pulled up. He was standing on the sidewalk in his brown cardigan with his hands behind his back, looking at the sign the way a man looks at a calf that got through the fence.

It was a good sign. I want to say that plainly, because it matters later.

Heavy brown board, cream letters cut clean, hung from an oak post set straight and deep in his grass right under the elm.

I knew it was a good sign because I knew who made it. My older brother Wyatt has owned a sign shop downtown for nineteen years.

Half the realtor signs in Box Butte County come out of his back room.

“Wyatt made that,” Dad said, before I could. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded like a man reading the weather. “I’d know his lettering anywhere. He does the corners round.”

I stood beside him and read it twice. For sale. A realtor named Coral Vinje. A phone number with an Alliance prefix.

Nothing else, no price, no mention that an 82 year old man was asleep inside when it went in.

“Did he tell you?” I asked.

“No,” Dad said. “He didn’t tell me. Esther across the street saw a fellow put it in about six this morning. She thought I knew. She brought over a coffee cake to say she was sorry I was moving.”

Then he laughed, a short one, the way he laughs at a bad call at a ball game.

“I told her I wasn’t moving. She looked at me like I’d lost my marbles. Maybe I have.”

“You haven’t,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

To understand why that sign could go in at all, you need to know what happened two years before, in the spring after our mother died.

Mom passed in March, after a long winter of going downhill slow.

Dad sat by her bed at the hospital every day and drove home every afternoon to feed her cat, and when it was over he was about half the size he’d been.