Thirty Neighbors Built Mom a Home

But she would have spent every one of them waiting for the next knock, and a fight like that runs through the winter with a motel room in Jefferson City in the middle of it. Mom did not want a ruling. She wanted a roof, a kitchen, and a place to put Dad’s chair.

So I did not say a word to Curtis. I want that understood. I did not call him that night, and I did not call him the next day.

I called the bank instead.

The money was the roof money.

My own house has a metal roof Dad and I put on in 2009, and the north side is going. For three years I had been putting away what I could from the co-op paycheck, and by that November the account held fourteen thousand dollars, which was about what a roofer had quoted me in September.

That afternoon I sat in my truck outside the credit union in Linn and thought about the roof for maybe one minute. Then I did the arithmetic on the other thing.

There was a dealer outside Jefferson City, a man named Bauer who bought used mobile homes off estates and resold them. I had seen his lot every time I drove Mom to her appointments. I called him from the parking lot.

“I need a single-wide,” I told him. “Two bedrooms. Sound floor, no soft spots. I need it set within the week.”

“Ma’am, nobody sets one in a week.”

“I know. I’ve got land, a well and a lot of neighbors.”

He laughed. Then he stopped laughing, because I didn’t. “I’ve got a 1996, fourteen by sixty-six, white siding. Two bedrooms, a good bath, new water heater last year. Seventy-five hundred. Delivery and set is eighteen hundred more.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You haven’t seen it.”

“My father ran a sawmill for thirty years,” I said. “I know what a rotted floor sounds like. I’ll come this afternoon.”

I did. I walked the whole floor in my work boots, bouncing a little in every room the way Dad taught me, and it was sound. The bathroom subfloor was tight. The kitchen had a counter in a mauve laminate that nobody has made in decades, and I loved it at once.

I put down the seventy-five hundred that night and wrote the check for delivery on the spot. Then I sat in my truck and shook.

Not from fear, exactly. It was the feeling of having spent my own roof on my own mother, and not being sorry.

The pasture behind my house is five acres. Dad hayed it for forty years, and after he passed, Mom and I kept up the fence and let a neighbor cut it on halves.

It slopes gently south toward a line of oaks. It has a well by the old barn that Dad drilled in 1988, and a utility pole on the corner where the electric co-op had run service to the barn. It also has fescue that stays green well into November, which is why the cattle liked it.

That same Wednesday night I called Hal Dobbs.

Hal manages the co-op where I keep the books. He is sixty-three, wide as a barn door, and has been telling me what to do since I was a girl bagging feed on Saturdays.