The House That Rolled Past His Gate

My brother Lonnie waited until the last casserole dish had gone home with the last church lady before he sat down at Daddy’s kitchen table and told me what I owed him.

It was a Tuesday in April, four days after we buried Daddy at Mount Pleasant.

The trailer still smelled like lilies and percolator coffee, and the folding chairs from the church were stacked against my new pantry door.

Lonnie didn’t take his jacket off. He laid his big hands flat on the table, the way Daddy used to when he had something hard to say, and he looked at the window instead of at me.

“Cheryl, I’m going to say this one time and then I don’t want to fight about it,” he said. “Family doesn’t profit off family. You’ve been living out here rent free for three years.”

I was holding a dish towel. I remember that because I kept folding it, smaller and smaller, until it was a square the size of a saltine.

“Starting the first of October, it’s six hundred and fifty a month,” Lonnie said.

“Or you can move out. I’m giving you the summer because of Daddy. That’s more than fair, and you know it is.”

Pam stood at the counter behind him with her purse on her shoulder. She was looking at the floor.

It was the floor I had laid myself, vinyl plank in a color called Smoked Hickory, on my knees for two weekends in June.

I didn’t say a word about that floor. I didn’t say a word about anything.

I said, “All right, Lonnie,” and I hung the dish towel on the oven door, and he blinked at me like a man who had braced for a mule kick and got a handshake.

He and Pam went out the door and down the steps of the deck I built. I heard his truck start.

Then I sat down in Daddy’s chair and cried for the first time since the funeral home.

How I came to be living in a trailer on my brother’s land

I should tell you how a forty-six-year-old licensed practical nurse ends up living in a 1994 single-wide on forty acres outside a town of two thousand people in middle Tennessee.

Daddy was Roy Ames. He farmed that ground most of his life, beef cattle and some hay, and he raised Lonnie and me on it after Mama passed when I was twelve and Lonnie was sixteen.

In 2014, when his knees got too bad for cattle, Daddy sold the forty acres to Lonnie on a land note through Farm Credit.

Lonnie had the farmhouse up by the road. Daddy kept the old single-wide back by the creek and a promise that he could live there until he died.

That was the deal, shook on at the kitchen table, and everybody honored it. Lonnie mowed around the trailer.

Daddy fed Lonnie’s few cows when Lonnie worked doubles at the tire plant. It worked for nine years.

Then Daddy got sick. Congestive heart failure, the doctor said, and his kidneys not far behind.

I was living in Murfreesboro then, divorced since 2013, my son grown and gone to the Army, renting a little duplex.

I work for the county health department. I did home visits for twenty years before that.

I knew what congestive heart failure looked like at the end, and I knew Daddy wasn’t going to a nursing home while I had breath in me.

So I transferred to our county office, gave up the duplex, and moved into the back bedroom of Daddy’s trailer. That was three and a half years ago.