The Cabin We Built Next Door

“Nora,” Roscoe said, “I have been waiting for you to ask me that since yesterday.”

Next to the old camp, on the other side of the two-track, there is a parcel of ten acres of mixed hardwood that sat unsold for six years. The owner lived in Illinois and had given up on it. Roscoe knew the number. Nine thousand dollars.

It was not cheap land in some ways. The sand is poor and the road washes out in April and there is no power within a mile.

There was a clearing of about a quarter acre where somebody had logged out a stand of aspen, level and sunny, and it sat close enough to the old camp that you could hear the old stovepipe if the wind was right.

Cody and I drove up that Saturday to look at it.

We parked at the end of the two-track and walked in through the oak leaves. It was the last week of September, the beech leaves just starting to go gold, the air cold in the shade and warm in the sun. My son walked the edge of the clearing with his hands in his jacket and did not say a word.

“It’s just woods,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“There’s no cabin on it.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s room to put one.”

He stopped. He looked at me for a while, and he looked at the clearing, and I saw him do the math the way his grandfather does it, in his head, the lumber and the foundation and the weekends.

“Mom,” he said. “How much?”

“Nine. I’ve got it.”

“That’s all your money.”

“It’s most of it. The cabin would have to come out of what’s left and what we can scrounge. Your grandfather says he’ll draw it.”

He looked at the ground. Then he did something I had not seen him do since he was small. He stepped over and put his arms around me and rested his chin on top of my head, which he can do now, and we stood there in the leaves like that for a good long minute.

“I don’t want you to spend it on me,” he said into my hair.

“I’m not spending it on you,” I said. “I’m spending it on a bag of dirt I can stand on. You can just use it.”

He laughed once. A short, wet laugh. That was the first one in four days.

We closed the following Friday, the third of October, at a title company in Gaylord, a small office with a fish tank and a woman named Deb who kept apologizing for the coffee. It took forty minutes. I wrote a check for nine thousand dollars plus eleven hundred in closing costs, and Deb handed me a folder.

Cody had turned eighteen the Tuesday before, the thirtieth of September, in a kitchen with a store-bought cake. Kurt had sent a text at eleven in the morning that said happy birthday bud and nothing else, and a gift card for a sporting goods store that I did not let Cody spend.

I want to be fair to Kurt, because I promised myself I would be. He was not a monster. He was a man in a hole, and he had decided his hole was worth more than his son’s promise.