The House I Bought Back for Dad

There’s the house key, a key to a padlock on the shed, and a little brass medal from the railroad for thirty years of service. Nothing else. He has never needed anything else.

“Dad,” I said, “you all right?”

“I keep thinking,” he said, “about whether I need to give this back to somebody. Whose key it is, now.”

That about undid me. I sat down on the arm of Mom’s chair, which I had never done in my life, and I put my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s your key, Dad,” I said. “Keep it in your pocket.”

On Sunday he went to church like always and sat in the same pew, third from the front on the left, where he and Mom sat for fifty years.

They sang the old hymn about the sweet by and by, and he sang all four verses without the book.

He never once asked me what I was up to. I think he knew I was up to something, and I think he didn’t want to jinx it.

On Thursday afternoon, a little after two, Coral called me at the county barn.

“Wyatt’s coming in at two-thirty to look at offers,” she said. “There’s yours, and there’s one from the Scottsbluff couple at one seventy-eight with an inspection and a loan. He’s going to want to know whose is whose.”

“Does he know it’s me?” I asked.

“He will in about thirty minutes,” she said. “I didn’t tell him. I thought you might want to.”

I washed up in the shop sink and drove over there in my county jacket.

I wanted my brother to see my face, not just my name on a line. I wanted him to have to look at me.

Coral let me sit in the chair across her desk. She put the two offers face up on the blotter in front of the empty chair beside me, and then she sat down and folded her hands and we waited.

Wyatt came in straight from his shop, three blocks over. He’s four years older than me, thinner, with Mom’s sharp chin.

He had his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and he was talking before he got through the door.

“All right, Coral, let’s see what we got,” he said. Then he saw me, and he stopped where he stood.

“Emmett,” he said.

“Wyatt.”

He sat down slow. He picked up the first offer, the one from the Scottsbluff couple, and read it, and set it aside.

Then he picked up mine. He read the price first. I watched his eyes go down to the line that says Buyer.

He looked at that line for a long time. Then he looked at me.

I didn’t say anything. I’d decided that in the truck. Anything I said would give him something to argue with, and I didn’t want an argument. I wanted him to read it.

Coral slid a pen across the desk to him and didn’t say anything either.

Wyatt set the paper down. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he said, “Where’d you get a hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars?”