Dad read it standing at the fridge with his reading glasses on the end of his nose.
Then he took a pen out of the junk drawer and added one line at the bottom, in his blocky foundry handwriting.
Nobody moves the swing.
Mom read it the next morning. She didn’t say anything.
But she left it up.There was one more thing we had to settle, and I knew it had to be on paper this time. Six years of handshakes and silence had gotten us right where we were.
The second week of November, I asked Mom and Dad to meet me at the office of a lawyer named Paul Brandt, over on the courthouse square. Paul had done our wills a few years back. He charged me $250 for an hour, and it was the best $250 I ever spent.
We sat in three chairs in front of his desk. Dad kept his barn coat on the whole time, like he might need to leave in a hurry.
Paul had drawn up a simple written agreement. Nothing fancy. Two pages.
It said Dennis Kolb could live at the Persimmon Street house for as long as he wanted, as an occupant with the permission of the two owners. It said he’d pay the gas and electric bills himself, starting January 1st. It said nobody else could move in without both owners agreeing in writing. And it said the owners couldn’t ask him to leave without ninety days’ written notice.
Paul read it out loud, every word. Then he slid it across the desk.
“Mr. Kolb,” he said to Dad, “this protects you as much as it protects them. Probably more.”
Dad read it twice. His lips moved a little when he got to the part about ninety days.
“They could put me out tomorrow without this,” he said slowly. “Couldn’t they.”
Paul didn’t answer that directly. He just said, “Your son asked me to make sure nobody could do anything to anybody in a hurry. Including you.”
Dad looked at me for a long moment.
Then he took the pen and signed his name.
Mom signed. I signed. Paul’s secretary notarized all three signatures with a heavy stamp that went chunk on the paper.
Out on the sidewalk afterward, Dad stood with his hands in his coat pockets.
“First time in six years I’ve had a piece of paper that says I live somewhere,” he said.
“First time you ever asked for one,” Mom said.
He almost smiled.
He’d gone to Miller Lumber the Monday after Tammy left and filled out an application. The yard manager was a man named Dale, who I’d gone to high school with.
Dale called me that night.
“Your dad came in today,” he said. “He said to tell you he applied, so you wouldn’t have to hear it from somebody else first. Is he going to be all right on a forklift?”
“He drove one for thirty-one years.”
“That’s what he said. He also said his back’s no good for lifting, and he’d tell me straight if it got bad.” Dale paused. “I appreciated that. Most guys his age lie about it.”Dad started the next week. Three days a week, eight hours a day, pulling orders for contractors and loading pickups with lumber and drywall.
He came home with sawdust in his collar and his face red from the cold. And he looked ten years younger.
The second week, Mom made him a lunch.
She didn’t say anything about it. She just set a brown paper bag on the counter next to his truck keys. A ham sandwich. An apple. And a thick slice of the persimmon pudding she makes every October from the tree in June’s backyard.
He looked at the bag. He looked at her back, standing at the sink.
Then he picked it up and took it to work.
I want to say something about Tammy Reese, because I don’t want anybody to think she was the villain in this story.
She wasn’t. She was a woman who believed a man she cared about. And he hadn’t told her the truth.
About a week after the truck, Dad drove out to her sister’s place in Bedford. He didn’t tell us he was going. He told me about it later, at the lumberyard, while he was loading drywall into the back of my truck.
“I told her all of it,” he said. “The apartment. The couch. The VFW parking lot. June’s house. Your mother’s money. The gas bill. Every bit of it.”
“What did she say?”
He set a sheet of drywall down very carefully, like it was glass.
“She said she wished I’d told her in March, because she’d have liked me anyway.”
He wiped his hands on his jeans.
“And then she said she’d still like to go to the fish fry on Fridays. If I was buying.”
Tammy and her boys rented a three-bedroom house on the north side of town the first of November. Dale at the lumberyard knew the landlord, and Dad put in a word, and that’s what it took. $1,150 a month, split three ways. Kyle got hired on at the same lumberyard in December.
Dad and Tammy go to the VFW fish fry every Friday night. She lives in her own place. He comes home by ten.
Mom leaves the porch light on for him and pretends she doesn’t.By Thanksgiving, my mother and father had settled into a kind of life together I wouldn’t have believed if you’d told me about it in October.
They aren’t married again. They’re not going to be. Mom says she’d sooner marry a snapping turtle. Dad says the turtle would get the better end of that deal.
But they’re something.
Mom cooks. Dad does the dishes. Mom watches her island show on Wednesdays. Dad watches the Indiana game in the back bedroom with the door shut and yells at the referees through the wall.
They sit on the porch swing most mornings before he goes to work. She has her coffee. He has his, black, out of the thermos. They don’t talk much.
They don’t have to.
On the morning after Thanksgiving, I came by early to look at the furnace before it got cold for real. Mom was still in her housecoat.
The light was coming in through the east windows of the front bedroom, through June’s lace curtains, landing on the floor in little flowers.
And on the windowsill, all in a row, June’s violets were blooming. Every single one of them. The purple ones. The pink ones. The white one with the blue edge.
Mom said they’d never bloomed like that in the north window. Not once in six years.
“They know where they are,” she said.
Dad came in from the kitchen with his work boots on and his lunch bag in one hand. He stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the violets for a minute, the same way he had that first day.
“June would have liked that,” he said.
“She would have,” Mom said.
Then he reached into the pocket of his barn coat and took out an envelope and handed it to me.
It was a bank envelope from the credit union. My name was written on the front in his blocky handwriting.
He didn’t say anything. He just nodded once, and went out the front door, and I heard the Silverado start up and pull away.
I sat down at June’s yellow kitchen table and opened it.
Inside were three crisp hundred-dollar bills. And a piece of Miller Lumber notepaper, folded in half.
It said: First $300 toward the gas bills. More on the 15th. Dad.
I sat there a long time with that note in my hand.
Then I went into the kitchen drawer by the phone, where I’d moved my little yellow sticky notes. Six years of them. Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars.
I took the top one off the pile. Eighty dollars, from a January three years back. And I threw it in the trash.
I figured I’d throw out one more every time he paid. However long it took.
It took him a little over two years. He never missed the 15th. Not once.
The last sticky note went in the trash on a Saturday morning in March. I was sitting on the porch swing with Mom when he handed me the envelope. When I told him that was the last one, he didn’t say anything at all.
He just sat down on June’s end of the swing, and Mom poured him a cup of coffee from the thermos, and the three of us sat there and watched the lilac by the back step start to bud.
