The House I Bought Back for Dad

The yellow paint, the elm, the porch where Mom used to shell peas. He stood there long enough that I thought he might come back.

Then he got in and drove away slow, and Dad watched him all the way to the corner.

The lake lot, I heard later from Coral, went through. Wyatt paid for it with the money from his father’s house, and he has to drive out there knowing that.

I don’t think he goes out there much. I think it cost him more than he expected.

The next Sunday, I came over after church to take Dad to dinner at the café, and I heard a lawnmower before I turned onto his street.

It was Wyatt. He was mowing Dad’s front yard in his church clothes with his good shoes on, going back and forth in straight lines, careful around the elm.

He had filled in the hole where the sign post stood with dirt and tamped it down.

He didn’t stop when I pulled up. He didn’t wave. He just kept mowing until it was done, and then he did the strip along the sidewalk, and then he trimmed by hand around the porch steps.

Dad was sitting on the porch watching him. He had a glass of iced tea in one hand and the other hand in his cardigan pocket, where his key ring was.

When Wyatt was done, he put the mower back in the shed. He used the shed key. Dad must have given him the spare.

Then he came up on the porch and sat down on the step below Dad, and Dad handed him the iced tea.

Nobody said anything about the house. They talked about the Huskers and whether the elm would need trimming before winter, and Wyatt said he’d bring his pole saw. I sat on the other side and listened.

It was not all fixed. It may never be all fixed. I don’t know yet if I can sit at Thanksgiving with my brother and not think about Esther’s coffee cake.

But he mowed. And he came back the Sunday after that and mowed again.

My wife and I won’t have the camper for a while. Maybe ever.

When I told her what the taxes came to in the end, she just said, “Well. We’ve got a good old tent,” and that was the end of it.

I stop by Dad’s most days after work now, on my way home from the county barn.

He’s on the porch if it’s nice, in his cardigan, and he always pats his pocket when he sees me, like he’s checking the key is still there.

It always is.

He never let me throw out Wyatt’s sign. The morning after closing he had me pull the post and carry the sign around back to his garage. I asked him once what he wanted with it.

“It’s good work,” he said. “Your brother does good work. I want him to remember that, every time he comes in here for the mower.”

So the sign stayed in Dad’s garage, face to the wall.