The House I Bought Back for Dad

He was a car man for the railroad for thirty-eight years, repairing coal cars in the yard here, and he is not a man who scares easy.

But paperwork scares him. Mom did the checkbook, the insurance and the taxes for fifty-one years.

That spring Wyatt started coming by on Sundays after church. He’d sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and talk about what would happen when Dad passed, which Dad did not want to talk about.

Nebraska is one of the few states that still has an inheritance tax. The county collects it.

For a child it’s one percent on whatever is over a hundred thousand dollars, and Wyatt got it into his head that it would eat us alive.

“Put the house in my name now, Dad,” he said. I was there for that one, at the end of the table.

“Then there’s nothing to tax. You keep living here. Nothing changes. It’s just paper.”

I said it didn’t sound right to me. I said we ought to ask somebody who knew.

Wyatt said he had asked somebody, a fellow he did signs for, and the fellow said it was the smart thing.

Dad looked at me, and then at Wyatt, and then at Mom’s chair, which nobody sat in yet.

I could see he only wanted the talk to be over. “If it helps you boys,” he said, “I’ll sign it.”

So he did. The title company drew up a plain deed and Dad signed it in front of their notary, and the house on the east side of town belonged to my brother.

There was no clause that kept Dad’s right to stay. It was just paper, like Wyatt said.

I should have pushed harder that day. I have said that to myself a hundred times.

But Mom was six weeks gone, and Dad was so tired, and I did not want to be the son who made a scene at her table.

The first thing that happened was the property tax went up. Dad had always had the homestead exemption for people over sixty-five, and you can’t claim that on a house you don’t own. So the thing done “for taxes” made his taxes higher.

Wyatt paid the difference the first year. The second year he didn’t, and Dad paid it out of his railroad pension without a word to either of us. I found the receipt later, folded in his Bible.

Dad’s kitchen still looks like Mom just stepped out of it. The yellow curtains she sewed, the rooster cookie jar, the calendar from the feed store turned to September. I sat him down and made coffee in her old percolator.

Then I took out my phone and called the number on the sign.

Coral Vinje answered on the second ring. She had a good, plain voice. I told her who I was and where I was standing, and there was a long quiet on the line.