She wasn’t in love with him. She hadn’t been in love with him for a very long time. But she wasn’t cruel. My mother has never been cruel to anybody in her life.We closed on it in May at Hoosier Title Company, in a little conference room with a bowl of peppermints on the table.
The closing agent was a woman named Carol with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She slid the warranty deed across the table and showed us where to sign.
“Grantees,” she said, tapping the page. “Shane Kolb and Linda Kolb. Tenants in common, equal shares. That right?”
“That’s right,” Mom said.
Carol had it recorded at the county the following Tuesday. They mailed us each a copy. Mine went into the gray fireproof box in our bedroom closet with our marriage license and the kids’ birth certificates.
Dad’s name wasn’t on the deed. There was never a lease. There was never any rent. Not one dollar, ever.
He moved in the first week of June. He said thank you once, in the driveway, without looking at either one of us.
Then he went inside and shut the door.
I want to be fair to my father. He’s my father, and he’s not a bad man. He’s a man who’s been disappointed by almost everything in his life, and who learned early to be the first one to walk away.
He kept the yard mowed. He kept the gutters clean. He fixed the drip in June’s bathroom sink with a washer from his own coffee can of washers. He repainted the porch swing every single spring. He didn’t tear the place up.
But he didn’t pay for it, either.
Mom paid half the property taxes, about $350 a year. I paid the other half, plus the homeowner’s insurance, $940 a year with Indiana Farm Mutual.
And most months, right around the twentieth, my phone would ring.
“Running a little short this month, bud.”
It was never a lot. Eighty dollars. A hundred and ten in January. A hundred and forty that February we had the ice storm.
I paid it because he was my father. And because it was easier to pay it than to listen to him not ask for it.
Six years of that is a lot of Januarys.
Mom never once went to the house in those six years. Not one time. When Dad moved in, she said it was his to live in until it was hers, and she wasn’t going to be the ex-wife standing in his kitchen.
But she’d ask me about it. Whether the lilac by the back step had bloomed. Whether he’d kept the porch swing painted. Whether the front bedroom still got the morning light.
I always said yes. Because it did.
That front bedroom has two windows on the east side. In the morning, the sun comes through June’s old lace curtains and lands on the floor in little flowers.
Mom would close her eyes when I told her that. Like she could see itAmy was at our kitchen table with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, doing the bills, when I got home that Tuesday night.
She took one look at my face and pushed the checkbook aside.
“What did he do?”
I told her. All of it. Tammy. The boys. The truck on Saturday. She listened all the way through without interrupting, which is one of the reasons I married her.
When I got to the part where he said we bought the house so we could feel good about ourselves, she took her glasses off and set them on the table.
“So call him back,” she said. “Tell him no. It’s your house.”
But I’d been telling my father no my whole life, and he’d never once heard it as anything but maybe.
He’d say “fine” and hang up. And then on Saturday morning, that truck would come anyway. And once Tammy’s boys had their beds set up and their mail coming to that address, I’d be the son who put his own father’s girlfriend and her kids out on the curb in November.
I’d never get them out without becoming a man I didn’t want to be.
“He doesn’t hear no,” I said. “He hears a starting price.”
I got up and went into our bedroom. I pulled the gray fireproof box down off the closet shelf and brought it back to the table. I dug through it until I found the envelope from the county recorder’s office.
I unfolded the deed and laid it flat between us.
Warranty Deed. Recorded May 14th. Grantees: Shane Kolb and Linda Kolb, as tenants in common.
Amy put her finger on Mom’s name.
Then I went to the drawer by the phone where I keep my receipts. I’d always kept them. I don’t know why. Habit, I guess. Every time I paid Dad’s gas bill, I’d written the amount on a sticky note and dropped it in that drawer.
I dumped them out on the table. Little yellow squares. Six years of them.
Amy picked up a calculator. She added them up while I sat there not saying anything.
“Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars,” she said quietly. “Just the gas. Not counting the insurance or your half of the taxes.”
We sat there and looked at that number.
“He told me it’s his house,” I said.
Amy thought about that. She put her glasses back on and looked at me over the top of them, the way she looks at a patient who’s just told her he feels fine.
“Then call your mother,” she said.I called Mom at nine o’clock, which is late for her.
She answered on the second ring with the television going in the background. Some show about people buying houses on tropical islands.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
Mothers don’t say hello after eight-thirty.
I told her everything. Tammy. The boys. Saturday. And I told her about the gas bills, which I’d never once told her in six years.
She was quiet for a long time.
“Well,” she said finally. “Isn’t that something.”
“Mom,” I said. “What’s going on with your lease?”
That was the thing I’d been carrying around in my head the whole drive home.
Mom’s lease at the Meadowbrook Apartments was up on October 31st. Ten days away. A new management company out of Indianapolis had bought the complex in the summer, and in August they’d sent every tenant a letter on fancy letterhead.
Her rent was going up $175 a month. From $790 to $965.
On a school cook’s income, with her retiring at Christmas break, that was not a small thing. She’d be living on her pension from the school corporation and an early Social Security check. She’d been fretting about it for two months and pretending to me that she wasn’t.
“I was going to talk to you and your daddy after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I was going to sign on for six more months and then see.”
“You don’t have to sign anything,” I said. “You own half a house.”
“Shane.”
“You were always going to retire there, Mom. That was the plan. That was the whole plan from the very beginning. You said it at the closing. I was sitting right there.”
“I am not going over there to fight your daddy,” she said. “I am 64 years old, and I have not been in a room with that man for longer than a funeral in twenty years. I’m not starting with a fight.”
“You’re not fighting,” I said. “You’re moving home.”
She didn’t say anything for so long I thought the call had dropped. I could hear the island show in the background. Somebody was very excited about a kitchen with an ocean view.
“The front bedroom gets the morning sun,” she said, very quietly.
“It does.”
“June’s violets would like that.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t ask. I just said I’d take Friday off and borrow a trailer and be at her apartment by seven.
After we hung up, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time with the deed still lying open in front of me.I called Rick at six Friday morning and told him I needed the day.
Rick has owned Hollis Heating and Air for thirty years. He doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t need answered. He just said he’d move the Hendersons’ heat pump to Monday.
“Give your mother my best,” he said.
Amy’s brother Jeff brought his flatbed trailer and his own dolly. The three of us were at Mom’s apartment by seven.
She had coffee made. She’d been up since four. And she’d labeled every single box in black marker in her careful school-cook printing.
Kitchen, everyday. Kitchen, good dishes. Bathroom. Winter clothes. Church.
And one small box, sitting on the counter all by itself, that said only one word.
