The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

It was my mother’s kitchen. I knew it before my brain caught up with my eyes, the way you know your own handwriting on an envelope before you read the name.

My coworker Kim had slid her phone across the break room table at the dental office in Ankeny, between my turkey sandwich and her yogurt.

“My sister and her girlfriends did a farm stay up north in July,” she said. “Isn’t it the cutest thing? They said it was so quiet they could hear the corn grow.”

The listing said Charming Iowa Farm Stay, sleeps 6, $140 a night. The first photo was the white two-story house from the road, with the porch and the big maple and the corn behind it.

The second photo was the kitchen. The long oak table my grandfather built. The cast iron griddle on the back of the stove where my mother made lefse every December.

“Tracy?” Kim said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I think I did,” I said. I scrolled with my thumb, and there was Dad’s recliner with a throw over it, and the upstairs bedroom with the slanted ceiling that used to be mine.

At the bottom of the page it said Hosted by Gordy. There was a small round photo of a man in a fishing hat squinting into the sun. I had known that squint since I was two years old.

There were 14 reviews. Wonderful quiet getaway. Host was so responsive. The kids loved seeing the barn. The calendar showed nearly every weekend booked from the middle of June on.

I asked Kim if I could send the link to myself. She asked if I was all right. I told her it was my dad’s house, and she put her hand over her mouth and did not say another word.

I had a patient at one o’clock, a teenage boy with braces. I cleaned his teeth. My hands did the work and my head was two hundred miles northwest, on a gravel road outside Sheldon.

My father is Arne Halvorsen. He farmed that ground for 61 years, corn and beans, and a few head of cattle until his knees gave out. He is 84 now, and since last winter he lives in assisted living in town.

He fell in February. He went out to the mailbox at the end of the lane in his house shoes, because he always did, and the ice took his feet out from under him.

The person who found him was Gordon Schaaf. Gordon lives a quarter mile down the gravel, and he has been Dad’s neighbor for 40 years and his fishing partner every Saturday morning they could get away.

He saw the mail flag still up at noon, which was not like Dad, and he drove down to look. He called the ambulance and rode with Dad to the hospital in Sheldon.

Gordon was the one who called me at work. I could hear in his voice that he had been crying in his truck before he dialed.

“He’s going to be all right, Tracy,” he told me. “He’s ornery as ever. He asked me to go back and put the mail flag down.”