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 it.Amy 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.
June.
By eleven, the trailer was full. On the way out, Mom stopped at the leasing office and handed the young woman at the desk her keys and a typed letter.
“That’s my notice,” she said. “I’ll be out by the thirty-first. You can keep my $500 deposit or mail it to me. Either way, I’m going home.”
The young woman blinked at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
By noon we were on Persimmon Street.
Dad wasn’t home. His truck was gone. He spent most days at Tammy’s sister’s place now, out on the county road past the grain elevator.
I had a key. I’d always had a key. I’d never once used it without knocking first.
I knocked anyway. Nobody came. I unlocked the door.
Mom stood on the porch for a long minute before she came in.
She put her hand on the white porch swing, the one June used to sit me on with a pan of green beans, and she gave it a little push. She watched it go back and forth.
“He kept it painted,” she said.
“Every spring.”
She went inside.
The front bedroom had been Dad’s junk room for six years. Boxes of old foundry paperwork. A broken treadmill. A recliner with the stuffing coming out of one arm. And about forty empty coffee cans he was saving for no reason anybody on earth could name.
Jeff and I hauled it all out to the garage.
By three o’clock, it was a room again.
Mom’s quilt on the bed. Her dresser between the two windows. Her recliner in the corner. Her Bible on the nightstand next to her reading glasses. Her housecoat on the hook on the back of the door.
The box marked June was still in the truck. Mom hadn’t let anybody carry it. When I asked where she wanted it, she said to just leave it in the cab for now.
So I did.
Jeff went home around three-thirty. Amy came over with a pitcher of sweet tea and sat on the back step.
And at four o’clock, I heard Dad’s Silverado pull into the driveway.Dad came in through the front door and stopped dead.
I watched him take it all in. Jeff’s tire tracks pressed into the yard. The empty spot in the front room where his treadmill used to be. The woman’s coat hanging on the hook by the door.
Then he looked down the short hallway. At the front bedroom door, standing open.
At my mother, standing in it.
“Hello, Dennis,” she said.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
He looked old, standing there. I hadn’t noticed it happening, but it had happened. His shoulders had come forward. His hair had gone white all the way through. His big foundry hands were hanging at his sides like he didn’t know what to do with them.
“What is this?” he said.
He was asking me. Not her.
“Mom’s lease is up on the thirty-first,” I said. “She retires at Christmas. She paid half of this house. She’s moving into the room she paid for.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Dad, the deed has two names on it. Neither one of them is yours. You don’t have a lease. You’ve never paid a dollar of rent. Mom and I get to say who lives here.”
I said it quietly. I’d decided in the truck that morning that I wouldn’t raise my voice no matter what he said. And I didn’t.
“Where am I supposed to put Tammy’s boys?” he said.
“That was always the question, Dad. You just never asked it out loud.”
He turned and looked at Mom.
She still had a coat hanger in her hand. She didn’t look away from him. But she didn’t look hard at him either. She looked at him the way you’d look at a dog that had gotten out and come home all muddy.
“You’re welcome to stay, Dennis,” she said. “Nobody’s putting you out. You’ll have the back bedroom like you’ve always had. I’ll have this one. We’ll work out the kitchen.”
“Linda, Tammy is coming at eight o’clock in the morning.”
“Then you’ve got tonight to call her,” I said.
He stood there a minute longer.
Then he walked through the kitchen, right past me, without a word. Out the back door. He sat down on the back step next to Amy.
She moved her tea glass so he’d have room.
