Thirty Neighbors Built Mom a Home

Curtis stood on the linoleum Mom had scrubbed for twenty-two years and told her where she could put her boxes.

“The garage is fine for a few things,” he said. “I’d rather the rest was gone by the Sunday before opening day. I’ve got people coming.”

Mom held a dish towel in both hands. She was folding it into smaller and smaller squares, the way she does when she is too polite to throw it.

I was at the kitchen table with a coffee I had not touched. I had come over on my lunch hour from the co-op because Mom had called and said only, “Can you come by? Curtis is here.” I had never heard her voice that small.

“Twenty-two years,” Mom said.

“I know, Aunt Robin.”

“Dewey and I moved in twenty-two years ago this spring. We put in the garden. We put the rail on the back steps.”

“And I appreciate all of that.” He still looked at the stove, not at her. “It’s a business decision. Hunters from Illinois will pay two thousand a month for the season and then some. You’ve been paying four-fifty.”

“Four-fifty,” Mom said, “and I never once paid it late.”

“I know that.”

Curtis is forty-seven. He is the only child of my mother’s younger sister, Jean, and when he was nine and Jean was working doubles at the shoe factory in Jefferson City, he slept on Mom’s couch more nights than he slept in his own bed.

He ate at our table. He rode in the back of Dad’s truck to church camp, and the year he broke his arm, Mom drove him to every appointment.

Now he was in a clean pressed shirt, with a clipboard he did not need, telling my mother to be gone by the Sunday before opening day.

I want to say I stood up. I want to say I said something cold and perfect. What I did was look at my mother’s hands.

Then I looked at the calendar on her wall, the one from the feed store, with opening day of firearms season circled in Dad’s old red pen. She never stopped circling it. Ten days away.

“Curtis,” I said. “Is there a lease?”

“Tina, you know there isn’t. It was never anything but a handshake with Uncle Dewey.” He said it kindly, and that was the worst of it. “Month to month. It’s all I’ve got to go on. I’m sorry.”

He left the way a man leaves who has done a hard thing and wants credit for the difficulty. After the truck was gone, Mom put the dish towel down on the counter and straightened it.

“Don’t say anything to him,” she said.

“Mom.”

“I mean it, Tina.” She took hold of my wrist at the sink, and her grip was stronger than I expected. “Family is family. Jean would turn over in her grave. I’ll not have a fight between you and her boy.”

“He is throwing you out.”

“He is a man who wants his house back,” she said. “It’s his house.”

That was the whole argument, and she had made it before I could. It was his house. The handshake was all we had.

Missouri wants thirty days’ written notice on a month-to-month, and a judge would have given Mom her thirty days.