The envelopes were tucked under the Easter plates. One at every place setting. Each with a name written on it in my mother-in-law\u2019s round schoolteacher handwriting.<\/p>\n
Kim opened hers first.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s the oldest. Divorced two years. Raising two boys in a rented trailer behind the grain elevator. She looked at what was inside the envelope and put her hand flat over her mouth.<\/p>\n
Then Jeff opened his. He\u2019d been laid off from the Caterpillar plant in the fall. He was driving a propane truck part-time now. He read his, and he looked up at his father, and he couldn\u2019t get a single word out.<\/p>\n
Then Stacy. The baby of the family. Twenty-six years old, with her nursing school loans. She started crying into her napkin.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty thousand dollars each,\u201d Ron said from the head of the table.<\/p>\n
He had his hand resting on the back of Judy\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cToward a house. Your mother and I sold the forty acres down by the creek. We want to see you kids settled while we\u2019re still alive to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Everybody was up out of their chairs and hugging. The ham was getting cold. Kim\u2019s boys wanted to know what was happening, and Kim couldn\u2019t even tell them.<\/p>\n
Nate and I had one envelope between us.<\/p>\n
I slid my thumb under the flap.<\/p>\n
It was a greeting card. It had a bluebird on the front.<\/p>\n
Inside, Judy had written:<\/p>\n
You two have always been so capable. We never worry about you. Love, Mom and Dad.<\/p>\n
There was nothing else in the envelope.<\/p>\n
I looked. I\u2019m a hospital billing clerk. I check things twice for a living. So I checked twice.<\/p>\n
I passed the card to Nate under the edge of the tablecloth.<\/p>\n
He read it. He read it a second time, slower. Then he folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket.<\/p>\n
And his ears went red. The way they do when a bolt shears off in his hand, or a customer calls him son.<\/p>\n
Ron lifted his coffee cup toward us across the table.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the truth, you two,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a compliment. You never gave us one day\u2019s worry. Either one of you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Judy was beaming at me.<\/p>\n
She meant it. That was the thing I understood, sitting there in the smell of ham and scalloped potatoes and Easter lilies. She\u2019d picked that card out special. She really thought she was handing us the best thing in the room.<\/p>\n
\u201cThank you,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lovely card.\u201d<\/p>\n
I could\u2019ve asked why. The question was right there in my mouth.<\/p>\n
But you can\u2019t ask for a gift. A gift is the one thing in this world you\u2019re never allowed to ask for. And it was Easter Sunday. And that woman had been on her feet since five in the morning cooking for all of us.<\/p>\n
So I thanked her. And I passed the rolls to Kim.<\/p>\n
And I was glad for Kim. I want that written down. I was glad for all three of them. Kim\u2019s two boys were sleeping in one bed.<\/p>\n
My name is Emily Schafer. I was thirty-three that Easter. Nate was thirty-four.<\/p>\n
Nate didn\u2019t say one word against his parents at that table.<\/p>\n
He ate his dinner. He helped his father carry the folding chairs back down to the basement. He kissed his mother on the cheek at the door on our way out.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t say anything in the truck either. Not until we were past the city limits sign and the fields opened up black on both sides of the road. Freshly worked. Waiting on corn.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow much have we got?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSix thousand two hundred,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t have to look it up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s rent again?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSeven twenty-five.\u201d<\/p>\n
He drove a while without talking.<\/p>\n
Nate is a diesel mechanic. He thinks the way he works. You find out what\u2019s actually wrong before you ever pick up a wrench.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not mad at Kim,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not even mad at them. They think they said something nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey did say something nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n
He took the card out of his shirt pocket and set it on the dashboard. Bluebird side up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d just like to be worried about one time,\u201d he said. \u201cJust to see what it\u2019s like.\u201d<\/p>\n
I laughed.<\/p>\n
And then I wasn\u2019t laughing anymore. And I looked out my window so he wouldn\u2019t have to watch me.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen we need second jobs,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll take harvest calls. Field service. Guys will pay cash to get a combine running at ten o\u2019clock at night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll take the diner,\u201d I said. \u201cPatty\u2019s been after me for a year to wait tables out at the truck stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re on your feet all week.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI sit all week,\u201d I said. \u201cThat\u2019s the trouble with billing.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was the whole meeting.<\/p>\n
We never had another one.<\/p>\n
So for two years, I billed insurance companies at the hospital from seven-thirty to four o\u2019clock, Monday through Friday.<\/p>\n
And on Friday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday mornings, I carried plates at the truck stop out on the highway.<\/p>\n
I learned to carry four dinners up one arm. I learned which of the seed corn salesmen tipped well, and which ones left a religious tract instead. I learned that a tired woman can actually sleep standing up next to the pie case for about forty seconds. If she hooks one elbow over the top of it.<\/p>\n
Nate worked his regular shift at the truck shop.<\/p>\n
And then, from September to Thanksgiving, he drove out to whatever field somebody\u2019s combine was broke down in.<\/p>\n
He replaced a feeder house chain by flashlight in a sleet storm. He rebuilt an injection pump on the tailgate of his truck at midnight.<\/p>\n
One night he came home at two in the morning with three hundred dollars cash in his coverall pocket. And a whole pumpkin pie a farm wife had made him take.<\/p>\n
He ate half of it standing at the kitchen sink.
\n
\nWe ate a great many eggs those two years.<\/p>\n
Nate sold his bass boat.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t ask me first. He didn\u2019t make a big speech about it.<\/p>\n
One Saturday the boat was sitting in our yard on its trailer. The next Saturday, there was a rectangle of dead grass where the trailer used to sit. And thirty-six hundred dollars more in our savings account.<\/p>\n
He loved that boat.<\/p>\n
And we went to every single Sunday dinner at Ron and Judy\u2019s that my shift schedule allowed. And we didn\u2019t tell anybody what we were doing.<\/p>\n
That was Nate\u2019s rule. I came to agree with it.<\/p>\n
If we told them we were saving for a house, it would sound like a hint. It would sound like a bill sent two years late.<\/p>\n
And neither one of us wanted one single dollar that had to be asked for.<\/p>\n
Kim bought a little ranch house on Maple Street with a fenced backyard. Jeff and his wife put their money down on a place in the new subdivision. Stacy kept hers in the bank until she finished nursing school.<\/p>\n
We went to both housewarming parties.<\/p>\n
I brought a casserole to each one. And I meant every noodle of it.<\/p>\n
At Jeff\u2019s housewarming, Judy came up and squeezed my arm.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou two will be next,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re so good with money.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working on it,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
The second spring, in March, I was eating my sandwich at my desk at the hospital with the county newspaper open to the legal notices.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where a billing clerk\u2019s eye goes, whether she wants it to or not.<\/p>\n
The county trustee was auctioning off its surplus property list. Those are the properties where nobody paid the taxes. And nobody redeemed them. Year after year. Until the county ended up holding them.<\/p>\n
Most of the list was empty lots and a burned-out filling station.<\/p>\n
One line was a house and two point three acres on the county road north of town.<\/p>\n
Everybody knew it as the Miller place.<\/p>\n
Old Dale Miller had died in that house. His children lived in Arizona and Oregon and had stopped answering the tax bills. The house had been standing empty for six years.<\/p>\n
You could see it from the blacktop as you drove by. A tall white farmhouse going gray. With a front porch that sagged in the middle like a tired horse.<\/p>\n
I drove Nate out there that evening.<\/p>\n
You weren\u2019t allowed to go inside before a county sale. You bought what you could see from the yard. You bought it as it stood.<\/p>\n
The weeds came up to my hip. There was an old cistern with a concrete lid. And right beside it, one stubborn clump of something red, just breaking ground.<\/p>\n
Nate walked all the way around the house once. Slowly.<\/p>\n
He got down on his belly and went under the porch with a flashlight. He stood back by the road and looked at the roofline for a long time with his head tilted. The way he sights down a driveshaft.<\/p>\n
\u201cRidge is straight,\u201d he said. \u201cFoundation\u2019s limestone, and it hasn\u2019t moved. The porch is shot. And I bet the wiring\u2019s older than Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
He rubbed his jaw.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood bones, Em.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat would it go for?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat have we got?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cForty-two thousand and some change.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen that\u2019s what it\u2019d go for,\u201d he said. \u201cOr it goes to somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sale was on a Thursday morning in April. Ten o\u2019clock. On the courthouse steps.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve held the county sales on those steps for as long as anybody can remember.<\/p>\n
The auctioneer was a man named Dobbs. Sixty or so. Tan windbreaker. A clipboard. And a voice that carried all the way across the square to the bank.<\/p>\n
There were maybe twenty people. Most of them were there for the empty lots.<\/p>\n
A landlord from over in the next county was standing near the front in a quilted vest with his hands in his pockets. I knew he was a landlord by his boots. They\u2019d never been in a field.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d taken a vacation day from the hospital. Nate came straight from a job with grease up to his elbows.<\/p>\n
The terms were printed on a sheet. Payment in full on the day of the sale. Certified funds. No warranty of any kind. A county deed, mailed when it was recorded.<\/p>\n
I had a cashier\u2019s check in my purse for forty thousand dollars.<\/p>\n
And underneath it, a bank envelope with two thousand dollars in cash. Because the rest of what we had was tip money. And I\u2019d never gotten it all turned into anything bigger than twenties.<\/p>\n
Dobbs read off the parcel number.<\/p>\n
\u201cHouse and two and three-tenths acres. Known locally as the Miller farm. Who\u2019ll give me twenty thousand?\u201d<\/p>\n
The quilted vest lifted one finger.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty-five,\u201d Nate said.<\/p>\n
It went up by thousands. Thirty. Thirty-five.<\/p>\n
At thirty-eight, the man in the vest stopped lifting his finger. He started saying the numbers out loud. I took that to mean he was thinking hard about each one.<\/p>\n
\u201cForty,\u201d Nate said.<\/p>\n
\u201cForty-one,\u201d said the vest.<\/p>\n
Nate looked at me.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d told him forty-two was the bottom of the jar. Past forty-two, there was nothing. Not a furnace filter. Not a gallon of paint.<\/p>\n
\u201cForty-one five,\u201d Nate said.<\/p>\n
Dobbs looked at the vest.<\/p>\n
The vest looked down at his sheet.<\/p>\n
And I watched that man decide that a sagging porch wasn\u2019t worth five hundred dollars more to him.<\/p>\n
He shook his head.<\/p>\n
\u201cSold,\u201d Dobbs said. \u201cForty-one thousand five hundred. Your name, sir?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSchafer,\u201d Nate said. \u201cNathan and Emily. Both names.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside at the county clerk\u2019s counter, I handed over the cashier\u2019s check.<\/p>\n
Then I counted out fifteen hundred dollars from the bank envelope. Mostly twenties. With a layer of fives and ones at the bottom that still smelled a little bit like the fryer.<\/p>\n
The deputy clerk counted it twice without one single remark. Bless her. And she wrote me a receipt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe deed will come in the mail in six or eight weeks,\u201d she said. \u201cBut the sheriff\u2019s office had the keys from when they boarded up the back door.\u201d<\/p>\n
She slid a manila envelope across the counter.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody\u2019s going to mind if you start mowing.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a ring of seven old keys. Two of them were skeleton keys. Not one of them was marked.<\/p>\n
We drove out there with the windows rolled down.<\/p>\n
We stood at the foot of those porch steps holding that ring of keys between us. Nate\u2019s hand was shaking. So was mine.<\/p>\n
\u201cCapable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
And then we both started laughing so hard I had to sit down on the bottom porch step.<\/p>\n
It held.<\/p>\n
We still didn\u2019t tell anybody.<\/p>\n
By then it wasn\u2019t a rule so much as a habit. And there was a little pride in it too. I\u2019ll own that.<\/p>\n
I wanted to hand them a finished thing. I wanted to say, come to dinner. And give them an address.<\/p>\n
It was a long, long way from finished.<\/p>\n
The fourth key opened the front door.<\/p>\n
Inside, it smelled like mice and wet plaster and somebody\u2019s old pipe tobacco. There was a calendar from a seed company still hanging on the kitchen wall. Turned to a July six years gone.<\/p>\n
The wallpaper in the front room was coming down in long sheets all by itself.<\/p>\n
The fuse box was in the cellar stairwell. Sixty amps for the whole house.<\/p>\n
When Nate unscrewed the first fuse, there was a penny jammed in behind it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s one way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Behind the plaster walls, it was all knob-and-tube wiring. Cloth-covered wire run through little porcelain knobs. Eighty or ninety years old. Brittle as a cracker.<\/p>\n
Nate did two years in the electrical program at the vocational school before he ever switched over to diesel.<\/p>\n
He went down to the county office and pulled a homeowner\u2019s permit. He bought a brand-new two-hundred-amp panel with the first paycheck after the sale.<\/p>\n
And then he rewired that entire house at night.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d come off his shift at five o\u2019clock. Eat whatever I\u2019d packed in a cooler for him. And work until eleven with a headlamp on. Because of course there was no power in the house at all. Just one temporary pole out in the yard.<\/p>\n
Room by room.<\/p>\n
He drilled the old wall studs. They were true two-by-fours, oak, hard as iron. He pulled new cable through them and stapled it neat as a seam.<\/p>\n
I never once saw him hurry a staple.
\n
\nI pulled wallpaper.<\/p>\n
There were five layers of it in the front room. And under the very last layer, somebody had written a column of numbers on the bare plaster in pencil. Somebody adding up sums a long time ago.<\/p>\n
I pulled wallpaper until my thumbs split open. Then I taped them up and went to my shift at the diner. And I came back.<\/p>\n
I was still working both jobs. The house had taken every dollar we had.<\/p>\n
Wire costs money. So does a new well pump. And a septic man. And a dumpster.<\/p>\n
There was one night in May when I sat down on an overturned five-gallon bucket in what was going to be the kitchen. Just to rest my feet for one minute.<\/p>\n
I woke up an hour later with my cheek pressed against the plaster wall. And Nate\u2019s work jacket over my shoulders.<\/p>\n
He hadn\u2019t woken me up.<\/p>\n
He was up on the ladder six feet away, still working. With his headlamp turned down low.<\/p>\n
The county inspector came out the first week of June.<\/p>\n
He was a quiet man named Larry. He went through the whole house with a flashlight and didn\u2019t say ten words. At the end he signed the inspection card and stuck it in the front window.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho\u2019d you say did this?\u201d he asked Nate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHm,\u201d Larry said. \u201cYou want a job?\u201d<\/p>\n
The power company set the meter that Friday.<\/p>\n
Nate threw the main breaker.<\/p>\n
And I stood in the kitchen and flipped the switch.<\/p>\n
And one bare light bulb came on. Hanging over the spot where a kitchen table ought to go.<\/p>\n
That same week, my phone rang at my desk at the hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily. This is Opal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opal is Nate\u2019s grandmother. Ron\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n
She was eighty-eight years old. She lived in the senior apartments behind the Methodist church. She did her own laundry. And she read the county paper front to back every single day with a magnifying glass. Legal notices included.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d always been a little afraid of Opal. She was a small, upright woman who didn\u2019t chatter.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpal? Is everything all right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe paper finally printed the trustee\u2019s sales,\u201d she said. \u201cIt says Schafer, Nathan and Emily, bought a house and two and three-tenths acres on the north road.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a pause.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that the Miller place?\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked around the billing office like somebody might be listening.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes ma\u2019am. We haven\u2019t told anyone yet. We wanted to get it fit to see first.\u201d<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t say anything for so long I thought the line had dropped.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome get me Sunday after church,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd don\u2019t tell Ronald.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOpal, it\u2019s not safe yet. The porch is bad. There\u2019s plaster down everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have walked on worse,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
And she hung up.<\/p>\n
So that Sunday, I pulled up in front of the Methodist church at a quarter past eleven.<\/p>\n
Opal came down the walk in her navy blue dress and her good shoes. Her pocketbook hung on her wrist. She let me help her up into the truck.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t say one word the whole way out.<\/p>\n
Six miles. She held that pocketbook in her lap with both hands and looked straight out the windshield.<\/p>\n
When I turned in at the lane, she made a small sound.<\/p>\n
I thought it was the ruts.<\/p>\n
Nate was waiting in the yard. He\u2019d cut the weeds back and laid two planks across the worst part of the porch.<\/p>\n
He came over to help her out of the truck. She lifted her hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can manage steps, Nathan.\u201d<\/p>\n
She wouldn\u2019t take my arm either.<\/p>\n
She went up those planks slowly, with her hand on the porch post. She went in through the front door.<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s the thing I noticed. The thing I couldn\u2019t account for.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t look around the way a visitor looks around.<\/p>\n
She walked straight through the front room. Turned left. Then right. Through a doorway we hadn\u2019t even hung a door on yet.<\/p>\n
Like her feet already knew exactly where the kitchen was.<\/p>\n
She stopped right in the middle of it. Under that one bare light bulb.<\/p>\n
She looked at the window over the spot where the sink used to be.<\/p>\n
She looked at the door to the little room off the kitchen. The one we\u2019d been calling the back bedroom.<\/p>\n
Then she went to the pantry. And she put her hand flat on the inside of the door frame, where the old varnish had gone nearly black.<\/p>\n
And she began to cry.<\/p>\n
There wasn\u2019t any noise to it. Her face didn\u2019t even change much. The tears just ran down her face, and she let them.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d known that woman eleven years. I\u2019d never once seen her cry. Not even at her own husband\u2019s graveside service, which the family still talks about.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpal,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat is it? Do you need to sit down?\u201d<\/p>\n
She was running her thumb down the wood. Feeling for something.<\/p>\n
About four feet off the floor, her thumb stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily,\u201d she said. \u201cDid nobody ever tell you whose house this was?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Millers\u2019,\u201d I said. \u201cDale Miller\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Millers bought this house at a sale in the fall of 1961,\u201d Opal said. \u201cThey got it for a good deal less than it was worth. They were decent people about it. And I never held it against them.\u201d<\/p>\n
She took a breath.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore that, it was Henry Brandt\u2019s. My father\u2019s. He built that porch himself. With his own hands.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at the little room off the kitchen.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was born in that room right there. In March of 1937. With a neighbor woman for a midwife. Because the roads were mud up to the axles, and the doctor couldn\u2019t get out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nate had come to the kitchen doorway.<\/p>\n
He was standing there with his cap in his hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cBring your light, Nathan,\u201d Opal said. \u201cHold it here.\u201d<\/p>\n
He put his headlamp up to the door frame where her thumb was.<\/p>\n
There were pencil marks in the varnish.<\/p>\n
A whole ladder of them. Short level lines, one above another. Each one with a date next to it in a man\u2019s square printing.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d scrubbed right past them a dozen times. I thought they were scratches.<\/p>\n
Nate read them out loud. His voice wasn\u2019t steady.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpal, six years, 1943.\u201d<\/p>\n
He moved the light up.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpal, nine years. Opal, twelve.\u201d<\/p>\n
He moved the light down. Near the bottom. There was one more line. Lower than all the others. In a different handwriting. A woman\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cRonnie,\u201d Nate read. \u201cFour years. 1960.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI made that one,\u201d Opal said. \u201cThe next year, we were gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
She told the whole story standing up. She wouldn\u2019t sit down until it was told.<\/p>\n
Her father died in 1957. He left the farm to her and her husband, Walt Schafer. Nate\u2019s grandfather. A hundred and sixty acres and this house.<\/p>\n
Walt was a hard worker. He wanted to do better than his father-in-law had done. He borrowed against the farm for a new tractor and a hog building.<\/p>\n
Then came two bad years. One right behind the other. A sickness went through the hogs. And the bank called the note.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey sold it right on the courthouse steps,\u201d Opal said. \u201cThe same steps you two stood on.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked out the kitchen window.<\/p>\n
\u201cWalt stood out there in the yard the week after, while they auctioned off all the machinery. I stood right here in this kitchen so I wouldn\u2019t have to watch. And Ronald was five years old. He stood out there holding his father\u2019s hand the entire time.\u201d<\/p>\n
She pointed at the window.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could see the two of them. Right through that glass.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDad never said a thing,\u201d Nate said. \u201cNot one time. We drove past this house every single Sunday of my life on the way to Aunt Carol\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYour father has not turned his head toward this house since he was five years old,\u201d Opal said. \u201cWatch him sometime. He looks at the other side of the road. Walt did the same until the day he died.\u201d<\/p>\n
She shook her head slowly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey decided it was a shame. And they buried it. And I let them. Because back then, a man\u2019s pride was about all he had left.\u201d
\n
\nShe put her hand on the pencil marks again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am eighty-eight years old,\u201d she said. \u201cI had made my peace that I would never stand in my mother\u2019s kitchen again.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at Nate. Then at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd you two children went and bought it with your own money. And told no one.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked down at the tape on my thumbs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhose money was it? Not Ronald\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo ma\u2019am,\u201d I said. \u201cOurs. Two years of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI heard about the envelopes,\u201d Opal said. \u201cAt Easter. I told Ronald at the time exactly what I thought about it. He said you two didn\u2019t need it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t need it,\u201d Nate said quietly. \u201cThat\u2019s not the same as not wanting to be thought of.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opal nodded. Once. The way you\u2019d nod at a child who just got a hard math problem right.<\/p>\n
Then she let me bring her the bucket. And she sat down on it, in her good navy dress, in the middle of her mother\u2019s kitchen.<\/p>\n
And Nate knelt down on that filthy floor and put his arms around her.<\/p>\n
I went out onto the porch planks and looked at that red clump by the cistern for a while.<\/p>\n
It was rhubarb.<\/p>\n
Opal told me later. Her mother planted it there in 1931.<\/p>\n
Opal told Ron herself.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t there for it. All I know is what Judy told me afterward.<\/p>\n
Opal telephoned their house Monday morning and said, \u201cRonald. You will drive me out to my father\u2019s house on Saturday.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Ron sat down in the kitchen chair without pulling it out first. And nearly missed it.<\/p>\n
They came at ten o\u2019clock that Saturday.<\/p>\n
I watched Ron\u2019s truck slow down at the end of the lane. And stop there on the blacktop.<\/p>\n
It sat there for what must have been a full minute before it turned in.<\/p>\n
Ron Schafer was sixty-nine years old that year. A big, square man. A union carpenter for thirty-eight years.<\/p>\n
He got out of the truck and helped his mother down. And then he just stood there in the yard.<\/p>\n
He looked at the cistern. At the corner of the porch. At a place in the grass by the old machine shed where there was nothing at all to look at.<\/p>\n
Judy had come too. She stood beside the truck with her hand pressed against her collarbone.<\/p>\n
Nate came down off the ladder.<\/p>\n
\u201cDad.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou bought it,\u201d Ron said. \u201cYou bought this place. And you never said one word to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t know what it was. I swear to you. Nobody ever told me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d Ron said. \u201cI don\u2019t guess anybody did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opal went inside by herself. Judy followed her. A minute later I heard Judy start crying in the front room.<\/p>\n
The three of us stayed out in the yard.<\/p>\n
Ron looked over the porch the way a carpenter does. I could see it pain him.<\/p>\n
Then he looked at the new meter base on the side of the house. At the conduit, running plumb as a ruler. At the permit card in the front window.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do all that?\u201d he asked Nate.<\/p>\n
\u201cNights.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd she\u2019s been out at the truck stop.\u201d Ron nodded at me. \u201cJudy saw her out there once. Carrying plates. I told her she had to be mistaken.\u201d<\/p>\n
He shook his head.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo years of that. You should\u2019ve told us you wanted a house. We would\u2019ve\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
He stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019d have what, Dad?\u201d Nate said.<\/p>\n
He wasn\u2019t angry. He was only asking.<\/p>\n
And then Ron said it badly.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t hold it against him now. He was standing in that yard at five years old again. It was all over his face. And a man in that condition grabs for whatever\u2019s closest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t see what there is to be sore about,\u201d Ron said. \u201cWe told you the truth. We said you were capable. Well. Look.\u201d<\/p>\n
He threw his hand out at the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook at this. Was I wrong? Kim was about to lose those boys\u2019 roof. Jeff was going under. You two never needed one thing from anybody. And I was proud of it. And I said so. That card was the nicest thing I knew how to say.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nate looked down at the ground. His ears were going red.<\/p>\n
I hadn\u2019t planned to say anything.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d thanked that man for the card two years before. And I\u2019d meant to leave it right there. Forever.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019d fallen asleep against a plaster wall the month before. My husband had sold his boat. And there was tape on both of my thumbs.<\/p>\n
\u201cRon,\u201d I said. \u201cIt was a nice thing to say. I know you meant it.\u201d<\/p>\n
I kept my voice down. I didn\u2019t want Opal hearing a quarrel inside that house. Of all the houses in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut capable people get tired too,\u201d I said. \u201cYou just never hear about it. Because we\u2019re the ones who don\u2019t call.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not asking you for anything,\u201d I said. \u201cI didn\u2019t then. I\u2019m not now. I just want you to know it cost something. It didn\u2019t come easy because we\u2019re us. It came hard. And we did it anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are two different things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ron didn\u2019t answer me.<\/p>\n
He stood there with his jaw working.<\/p>\n
Then he went and got his mother out of the house. He helped her back up into the truck. And they drove away.<\/p>\n
He looked straight down the lane the whole way out.<\/p>\n
Nate put his arm around me.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s said.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI shouldn\u2019t have said it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou should\u2019ve said it at Easter two years ago,\u201d Nate said. \u201cI should have.\u201d<\/p>\n
He kissed the top of my head. There was sawdust in my hair.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome hold the ladder.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next Saturday, I drove out at seven a.m. Nate was already there working.<\/p>\n
At twenty minutes to seven, he told me, a truck had turned in at the lane.<\/p>\n
His father\u2019s.<\/p>\n
The truck bed was full. Sawhorses. A table saw under a tarp. Two twenty-ton bottle jacks. A stack of cribbing blocks. The old worm-drive saw Nate had been forbidden to touch as a boy. And a four-foot level in a canvas sleeve.<\/p>\n
When I walked up, Ron was lying on his back under the porch. All I could see were his boots.<\/p>\n
He slid out.<\/p>\n
He had cobwebs in his eyebrows. He stood up slowly, the way a man his size has to.<\/p>\n
And he took his cap off.<\/p>\n
\u201cEmily,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d like to try that again. If you\u2019ll let me. I\u2019ve had a week to work on it. And I had my mother helping me. And she wasn\u2019t gentle.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll right,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
He pointed with his cap. At that place in the grass where there was nothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad stood right over there in 1961 and watched them sell his plow,\u201d Ron said. \u201cNot one soul put a hand out to him. Not his brothers. Not the church. Nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n
He turned the cap in his hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was five years old. And I made up my mind standing there. If a child of mine was ever going under, I\u2019d be there with money in my hand before they ever had to ask.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cKim was going under. Jeff was. Stacy had those loans. You two weren\u2019t. So I figured I was done with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
He shook his head slowly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had it all worked out that help is for people who are drowning. It never once came into my head that help is for the ones who are swimming hard, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at the porch.<\/p>\n
\u201cI gave you two a pat on the head. And I gave them the farm ground. And I called it a compliment. And you thanked me for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
His voice got rough.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve thought about that thank you every night this week.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRon\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me finish. I\u2019ve only got it memorized the one way.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the closest thing to a joke I ever heard that man make.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to write you a check,\u201d he said. \u201cI could. Judy wanted to bring one this morning. But you\u2019d be right to tear it up. And I\u2019d be buying my way out cheap.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked up at the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou two bought my grandfather\u2019s house with tip money and a bass boat. A check from me now would just be me trying to put my name on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He put his cap back on.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I can do is build. That front beam is rotted clean through, and the porch posts are standing on nothing. That porch is going to hurt somebody. And my mother means to sit on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He looked at me straight.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d take it as a kindness if you\u2019d let me work on this house. Saturdays. As long as it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t talk. I just nodded.<\/p>\n
\u201cNate,\u201d Ron called. \u201cBring me that jack. And don\u2019t you touch my saw.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m thirty-six years old, Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you\u2019re old enough to know better.\u201d
\n
\nHe came out eleven Saturdays.<\/p>\n
I know because I counted them off on the feed store calendar I\u2019d hung on the kitchen nail. Right where the old seed company calendar used to be.<\/p>\n
He gave the first three Saturdays to the porch.<\/p>\n
He and Nate jacked up the porch roof an eighth of an inch at a time. They set it on cribbing blocks. They took out every rotted post and the whole front beam.<\/p>\n
Ron wouldn\u2019t put treated pine where his grandfather had put fir. He found tongue-and-groove fir flooring at a lumberyard forty miles away. And he paid for it himself.<\/p>\n
When I opened my mouth to argue, he said, \u201cThat\u2019s lumber. Not a check.\u201d And I closed my mouth.<\/p>\n
He turned new porch posts to match the one good old post that was left. He did it at home, on his own lathe, at night. He brought them out wrapped in a moving blanket like they were babies.<\/p>\n
The fourth and fifth Saturdays, he did windows. He reglazed the old window sashes one by one on sawhorses out in the yard. He taught me how to run a putty knife so the line comes out clean.<\/p>\n
The sixth Saturday, he hung doors.<\/p>\n
The seventh, eighth, and ninth, he built kitchen cabinets. Plain ones. Face frame. The same kind that were in that kitchen when his grandmother cooked in it.<\/p>\n
He asked Opal what color they\u2019d been.<\/p>\n
\u201cCream,\u201d she said. \u201cWith a green line.\u201d<\/p>\n
He painted that green line himself. With a quarter-inch brush. Very slowly.<\/p>\n
He wouldn\u2019t let anybody sand the pantry door frame.<\/p>\n
He masked it off with his own hands. He varnished right up to the edge of the pencil marks. And stopped.<\/p>\n
Judy came out every Saturday after that first one.<\/p>\n
She brought dinner in a roaster. And she brought her sewing machine. She made curtains for nine windows.<\/p>\n
On the fourth Saturday, she found me alone at the pump. And she took both my taped-up hands in hers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI picked out that card,\u201d she said. \u201cI stood in the drugstore for a quarter of an hour, finding exactly the right one. I thought you\u2019d keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her chin was shaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never once asked myself what it would feel like to open it at that table. In front of everyone. I\u2019m so sorry, honey.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI did keep it,\u201d I told her.<\/p>\n
That was the truth. It was in a drawer.<\/p>\n
Kim came out on the sixth Saturday with her two boys. They pulled nails all day.<\/p>\n
Jeff came on the eighth Saturday with a borrowed trencher. He ran a brand-new water line from the well.<\/p>\n
Stacy painted the whole upstairs.<\/p>\n
Nobody asked any of them to come. I think Opal had been on the telephone.<\/p>\n
Those Saturdays did something to Nate and his father that I could never have done with any amount of talking.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t say much to each other. They just handed each other things.<\/p>\n
Along about the ninth week, I came around the corner of the house with two glasses of iced tea.<\/p>\n
And I found Ron showing Nate how to scribe a cabinet to a crooked wall. The two of them had their heads bent close together.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour great-grandfather never owned a level,\u201d Ron was saying. \u201cLook at this wall. The man built by eye.\u201d<\/p>\n
And he was laughing.<\/p>\n
In that yard. With his face turned full toward the house.<\/p>\n
On the eleventh Saturday, when all the tools were loaded back in his truck, Ron took the carpenter\u2019s pencil from behind his ear.<\/p>\n
He went into the pantry.<\/p>\n
He stood my husband up against that door frame. And he made a new line above all the others.<\/p>\n
Nate, 36 yrs, he wrote. And the year.<\/p>\n
Then he handed the pencil to me.<\/p>\n
And I stood Ron up against the door frame and marked him.<\/p>\n
We gave notice at our rented duplex. We moved into the house the second week of October.<\/p>\n
I gave my notice at the truck stop the same day.<\/p>\n
Patty cried. She gave me a key to the pie case as a keepsake. I took it as the highest honor that establishment had to offer.<\/p>\n
For Thanksgiving, we set the table in the little room off the kitchen.<\/p>\n
It was the only room on the ground floor big enough once all the table leaves were in. And anyway, there was no question about it.<\/p>\n
Seventeen people.<\/p>\n
Kim\u2019s boys at a card table. Jeff carving the turkey, because Ron said his hands were too tired. Which wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n
Rhubarb sauce on the table. Out of Judy\u2019s freezer. From the patch beside the cistern, cut that June.<\/p>\n
Opal sat at the head of the table. Nate carried her chair in himself.<\/p>\n
She was wearing the navy dress.<\/p>\n
Ron stood up to say grace.<\/p>\n
\u201cLord,\u201d he said. \u201cWe thank you for this house\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
And then he couldn\u2019t go on.<\/p>\n
He just stood there. A big man in a clean, pressed shirt. With his hand resting on the back of his mother\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n
And his mouth wouldn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
Nobody moved.<\/p>\n
Kim\u2019s youngest boy started to ask something. Kim touched his shoulder, and he stopped.<\/p>\n
Opal reached up and laid her hand over her son\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd for the children who brought us back to it,\u201d she said. In a perfectly steady voice. \u201cAnd for the ones who are tired, Lord, and do not say so. Teach us to look. Amen.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAmen,\u201d Ron said.<\/p>\n
Opal looked down that long table. At every single face.<\/p>\n
Then she looked over at the kitchen window. The one she\u2019d stood behind in 1961 so she wouldn\u2019t have to watch.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was born six feet from this chair,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Then she unfolded her napkin.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomebody pass me those potatoes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bluebird card lives in my kitchen drawer now. With the rubber bands and the birthday candles.<\/p>\n
I found a use for it.<\/p>\n
In February, once I was sure, I took it out of the drawer.<\/p>\n
Under Judy\u2019s handwriting, I wrote one line in pencil.<\/p>\n
We are still very capable. But come August, you will have somebody new to worry about.<\/p>\n
And I mailed it back to her. In a fresh envelope.<\/p>\n
Ron was at our front door within the hour.<\/p>\n
He had his level with him.<\/p>\n
He said the back bedroom upstairs was going to need shelves.<\/p>\n
Before he left, he went into the pantry and stood there looking at the door frame for a long time.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s room on that door frame for a good many more marks.<\/p>\n
He measured.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The envelopes were tucked under the Easter plates. One at every place setting. Each with a name written on it in my mother-in-law\u2019s round schoolteacher handwriting. Kim opened hers first. … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23561,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16,6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-family","category-inspiration","category-news","category-real-life-story"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23564,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23563\/revisions\/23564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyreadin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}