The Debt Gordon Left Sara’s Son
The Gray House Across the Road
We live on a county road a few miles outside New Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the kind of stretch where the houses sit far enough apart that you know your neighbors by their porch lights before you know their last names. I have raised my son out here alone since he was a baby. His father left before Greg could walk, took a job two states away and never once turned it into a visit, and I decided a long time ago that I was not going to spend my life being angry at a man who had already forgotten us. It takes less out of you to just get up and do the next thing.
I worked the front desk at the county hospital for eleven years, then moved into billing when a spot opened up, because billing paid two dollars more an hour and did not require me to stand for ten hours straight. Greg grew up with a key around his neck and a list of chores taped to the refrigerator, and by the time he was in middle school he had gotten very good at filling his own afternoons without waiting on me.
Our whole world out there was small in the way that small towns are small, which is to say it was not small at all once you actually lived inside it. There was the diner on Main where the same six farmers held the same six stools at six in the morning every day of the week. There was Deibler’s feed and farm supply, where Greg would end up buying tractor parts on credit before he was old enough to drive himself there. There was the VFW hall that hosted the fish fry every Friday during Lent, and the high school stadium lights that came on every autumn Friday and turned the whole county road quiet for three hours, because everybody who wasn’t at the game was at home listening to it on the radio. And there was church, for those of us who still went, and church potlucks in a basement that smelled like coffee and casserole no matter what season it was.
Across the road from us was a gray house that had needed paint since before we moved in. An old man named Gordon Hausner lived there by himself. I knew him the way you know somebody you wave to from your car. He had been a diesel mechanic most of his life, kept his own truck running into its twenty second year out of pure stubbornness, and his wife, Mrs. Hausner, used to bring a pound cake over every Easter until she passed. After that, Gordon stopped bringing anything anywhere. He stopped going to church. He stopped sitting on the porch except in the very early morning, before the rest of the road was awake to see him do it.
His grass got long. Nobody said anything about it, the way you don’t say anything about a widower’s yard in a town small enough that everybody already knows the reason for it. Gordon knew my name, Dianne, the same way I knew his, though in four years he used it directly to my face maybe half a dozen times, always careful, like a man handing you something breakable he wasn’t sure you wanted.
Everybody except my son, apparently, who was fourteen and had never learned yet that some things are supposed to be left alone.