The Dollar Farmhouse and the Upstairs

Mom did not take her coat off. That was the first thing I noticed. She sat down at my kitchen table on a Tuesday night in March with her purse still hooked over her arm, like she might need to leave in a hurry.

Dad sat next to her with his seed cap in his lap. He turned it around and around by the bill, the way he used to in the pew when the sermon ran long.

“We won’t keep you,” Mom said. “You’ve got the route in the morning.”

“I’ve got coffee on,” I said. “Stay as long as you want.”

Dale was at the end of the table in his barn socks. He had come in from the finishing barns twenty minutes before, showered, and was still pink around the ears. He nodded at my folks and didn’t say anything. Dale doesn’t say anything unless it needs saying.

Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked at his cap. “It’s about Jeff,” Mom said.

I had figured that. Everything that winter had been about Jeff.

My little brother is forty-three. His wife, Amber, packed her car the second week of January and moved to Sioux Falls. She told him she had been unhappy for six years. She left him the kids, the bills, and the lease on a rental house in town that the landlord was selling out from under them.

Since February, Jeff and his three kids had been living in my parents’ basement. Brody is twelve. Kenzie is nine. Cole is six. They were sleeping on air mattresses next to Dad’s deer mounts and the chest freezer.

“Those kids can’t keep living like that,” Mom said. “Cole wet the bed twice last week. Kenzie cries in the bathroom so her dad won’t hear.”

“I know, Mom.”

“So your dad and I have been talking.” She took a breath. “We’d like you to sell us the house back. For a dollar. The same as we sold it to you. So Jeff can have it.”

The furnace kicked on in the basement. I could hear it hum up through the floor register by my feet.

It was a good furnace. I knew exactly what it cost.

The dollar

I need to tell you about this house, or none of the rest makes sense.

It sits on a gravel road four miles out of town in northwest Iowa, a white two-story with a porch across the front and a windbreak of cedars on the north side. My great-grandfather Kirchner built it in 1912. My dad grew up in it. So did I, and so did Jeff.

In 2005 my folks sold the cows, rented the ground to the neighbor, and bought a little ranch house in town with a walk-in shower and no stairs. Dad’s knees were done. Mom was tired of hauling groceries four miles on gravel.

The farmhouse sat empty that whole winter. Then in 2006 I married Dale, and Dad sat us down at this same table.

“Your mother and I want to sell you the house,” he said. “For a dollar. We want you close.”

I laughed. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

Dad split the house and two acres off the farm. The surveyor came out. Their accountant in town filed a gift tax return for them, because a house worth more than a dollar going for a dollar is a gift in the government’s eyes. Nobody owed a cent of tax. It was just paperwork.

At the closing, I took a dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it across the table to my father. He folded it in half and put it in his shirt pocket and patted it.

“Paid in full,” he said. Everybody laughed. Mom cried a little. I was twenty-six years old.