“I went back and forth on calling you,” he said finally. “Two days I went back and forth. I didn’t want to be the old busybody across the street. But Ardis’s mother sat with my Arlene when she was dying. Every afternoon for three weeks. And I figured I owed your family the truth more than I owed anybody my good manners.”
“You did right, Vern.”
“I hope so,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on things. I won’t say a word to Brett.”
I thanked him and hung up.
Then I sat down on the step of a trailer that wasn’t mine, in a state that wasn’t mine, and looked down at my own two hands for a long, long time.
Ardis and I had been wintering in Mesa for six years by then.
We rented the same park model every year. A little white one with green trim, at a resort full of Iowa and Minnesota license plates. The biggest argument all winter long was about the shuffleboard schedule.
Going down there was Ardis’s idea the first time.
I retired from the grain elevator at sixty-three, after forty years. And that first winter home, my knees got loud about January. Louder than they ever were when I was working. I’d sit at the kitchen window every morning watching the snow and wishing for something to fix.
Ardis finally put her coffee cup down one morning and said, “Gordon, I’m tired of watching you sit at that window. We’re going someplace warm.”
So we went. November to May. Home for Mother’s Day, every year.
And every year, somebody had to watch the house.
The first four winters, it was Vern, with a neighbor boy to do the shoveling.
Then Brett’s marriage ended.
He moved into a little apartment over the old bakery on Main Street. Two rooms and a hot plate. And that fall, Ardis said, “Why should Brett be paying rent on that little place when our house sits empty half the year?”
I said that was a good point.
I also said it wasn’t how I would have done it.
We worked it out between us. Brett kept his apartment. He’d stop at the house every couple of days. Run the faucets on the north wall when it went below zero, so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Check the furnace filter. Keep the walks shoveled for the mail carrier.
In return, he could park his truck in our garage during the bad weeks.
That was the whole deal. I wrote it down on an index card and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet, in my own handwriting.
I’m a man who likes things written down on index cards.
Ardis came back from the pool around four o’clock that afternoon. She had a towel around her neck and her library book tucked under her arm.
She read my face from all the way across the gravel lot. Forty-two years of marriage will do that.
“Is it Brett?” she said.
“How did you know?”
“Because you only look like that about Brett.”
I told her everything Vern said.
The girlfriend, whose name was Jade. The brother, whose name Vern thought was Austin. The basement. The six hundred dollars a month.
Ardis sat down on the step beside me.
She didn’t cry. She took the towel off her neck and folded it into a square on her knees. Very neat. Then she folded it again. Then again.
“Six hundred dollars,” she said. “For our basement. With the sump pump that hollers every time it rains.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Since January.”
“That’s what he said.”
She looked out across the lot at the lemon tree, where our neighbor from Mankato was picking lemons into an old coffee can.
“What are you going to do, Gordon?”
I’d like to tell you I had a plan right then. I didn’t.
What I had was a list of things I wasn’t going to do. And that list got longer and longer as the evening went on.
The first thing I thought about was the sheriff.
I thought about it for about a minute.
I knew exactly how that call would go. I’ve known the Winnebago County deputies most of their lives. Dale Herman would come out. He’d be kind about it. And he’d tell me what I already knew.
A grown man who’s been paying rent every month and keeping his things in a basement isn’t a burglar. Even if he paid it to the wrong person. That’s a civil matter. You give written notice. You wait. Nobody gets carried out into an Iowa March by a deputy just because his landlord turned out to be somebody’s son.
And even if the law was simple, I wasn’t going to do it.
I wasn’t going to send a man in uniform to my own son’s door. Not in a town of twenty-two hundred people. Where the sheriff’s log runs in the paper every Thursday, and it gets read out loud at the café before it ever gets read at home.
That night, we sat at the little table in the park model with a plate of saltine crackers nobody was eating.
“Call Brett,” Ardis said. “Just call him. Ask him.”
“And he’ll tell me what?”
“The truth, maybe.”
“On the phone?” I shook my head. “He’ll have a story ready before the second ring. And then he’ll have two days to empty out that basement and hide the whole thing. He’s had since Christmas to get one ready.”
Ardis didn’t like that. And she was right not to like it. It was a hard thing to say about our son.
But I’ve known Brett for thirty-six years. And on the telephone, he has always been somebody else. Smooth. Cheerful. Everything’s great, Dad. Everything’s fine.
“I want to see his face,” I said. “That’s all. I want to be standing right in front of him when he tells me.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll know what to do.”
Ardis looked at me for a long time over the plate of crackers.
Then she got up. She took the calendar off the wall. It was the one from the co-op, with a different John Deere tractor every month. She counted on her fingers.
“Our lease here runs through April,” she said. “We’ll lose the rest of it.”
“I know.”
“And Brett will see us coming, Gordon. Vern will tell somebody. Or somebody will see the Toyota at the Casey’s and mention it at church.”
“Then he’ll see us coming,” I said. “I’m not sneaking up on my own house.”
The next morning, we told the park manager we had a family matter back home.
She was nice about it. Everybody down there is nice about it. Because everybody down there has a family matter back home, sooner or later.
We spent three days shutting the place down.
Ardis cleaned out the refrigerator and wiped down every shelf. I drained the hoses, took in the folding chairs, and pulled the little welcome flag off the post. The one with the cardinal on it.
Our friends from Spirit Lake, Don and Lorraine, had us over for a goodbye supper on Saturday night. Tater tot hotdish and bars.
They didn’t ask us a single question. Not one.
That’s about the kindest thing one Iowa couple can do for another.
We pulled out of the park on Sunday morning at daybreak.
It’s 1,480 miles from that lot in Mesa to our driveway in Iowa. The way I drive it, anyway.
I’d done it twelve times. Down in November, up in May.
I’d never once done it in March.
The first day was all desert and quiet.
Up through Payson. Over the Mogollon Rim, with the pine trees and the red rocks. Across to the interstate.
Ardis knitted for about an hour. A blue sweater for our granddaughter, Emma. Then she put it away in her bag and just watched the country go by out the window.
We stopped that first night at a motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. It had a neon sign out front shaped like a big red arrow.
I couldn’t sleep.
I lay there on that lumpy mattress listening to the semi trucks going by out on the interstate. And I did arithmetic I didn’t want to do.
Six hundred dollars a month.
January. February. March.
Eighteen hundred dollars. Somebody’s hard-earned paychecks. Handed over to my son for a room in my house. While I was paying the property taxes on it.
I lay there and stared at the water stain on the motel ceiling until the sky started getting gray.
The second day, we crossed the Texas panhandle in a hard wind that pushed the Toyota around the whole way. Then up into Kansas. Flat and brown as far as you could see.
Somewhere past Liberal, Ardis said the first thing she’d said in two hundred miles.
“Do you remember when he was eight? And he brought home that dog?”
“Biscuit,” I said.
“He hid that dog in the garage for four whole days. Fed it his own lunch meat out of his lunchbox. He was so afraid you’d make him take it back to the farm.”
“I didn’t make him take it back.”
“No,” she said. “But he was afraid you would. He was always afraid of that, Gordon. More than anything else in the whole world, he was afraid of disappointing you.”
I didn’t answer that.
I didn’t have an answer for it.
I just drove.
We stayed the second night in Salina, Kansas.
I called Vern from the motel parking lot, standing by the ice machine, so Ardis wouldn’t hear me.
“Black pickup’s still in your driveway,” Vern said. “That’s the brother’s. Brett’s been around most days. His truck comes and goes. The girl leaves for the care center about six every morning, regular as a clock.”
“Thank you, Vern.”
“Gordon,” he said. And then he paused. “Go easy, if you can. That boy’s been carrying something heavy. You can see it in how he walks.”
I stood by that ice machine for a long time after we hung up.
Tuesday morning, we left Salina at five o’clock, in the dark.
North, up past Concordia, toward Nebraska. The fields were brown and wet and empty. Old cornstalks stuck up out of the mud like broken pencils.
Ardis had her hands folded in her lap.
Outside Concordia, she said, “He never asks us for a dime, you know. Not since he was eighteen.”
“No,” I said. “Maybe that’s the trouble.”
She turned and looked over at me then.
I think that was the first thing I’d said on that whole trip that she agreed with.
We crossed into Iowa at Council Bluffs a little before ten in the morning.
North of Ames, the snow started showing up in the ditches. Old and crusted. Gray along the shoulders where the plows had thrown it up all winter.
I knew every grain elevator on that road. Every single one. I could have told you which co-op owned it. What it held. Who managed it back in 1990, and who his wife was.
So I did. For about forty miles.
“That’s the Farmers Co-op in Story City. Merle Lindgren ran that one. His wife made the best rhubarb pie in Story County.”
“Is that right,” Ardis said.
“That one’s West Central. They put in the new leg in ’98.”
“Is that right.”
She let me go on like that for a long time. I think she knew I needed to.
We turned onto our street on Tuesday at two-thirty in the afternoon.
Our town has one stoplight. Two churches with white steeples you can see from the county road. A Casey’s. A café. And the co-op elevator on the east edge of town that you can see from six miles out, in any direction.
Our house is a low ranch house with cream-colored siding and a wooden front stoop I rebuilt myself in 1994. It sits on a street full of houses just like it. Where everybody knows everybody else’s car.
The snow piles along the curb were gray with road salt and gravel. The big maple in our front yard was bare.
And there was a black Chevy pickup I’d never seen before in my life, parked right at the curb in front of our house. Like it lived there.
Brett’s blue truck was nowhere.
Across the street, Vern’s front curtain moved. Next door to him, Pam Henderson’s curtain moved too.
By the time I pulled our old tan Toyota into the driveway, I’d guess at least six households on that street knew Gordon and Ardis Brekke were home two months early.
The Toyota had fourteen hundred miles of road grime up both sides. I hadn’t had the heart to stop and wash it.
Ardis got out. She went around to the trunk and took out her rolling suitcase. Just the one. And she wheeled it up the front walk to my side.
She didn’t need it. Everything else was still in the trunk.
I think she just needed something to hold on to.
We walked up the front walk together. Somebody had shoveled it. And salted it. Clean all the way down to the concrete.
Through the big front window, I could see Ardis’s African violets. On the white plant stand where she always kept them. Purple ones and white ones, all crowded together.
Still blooming. In March.
Ardis stopped dead on the walk and looked at them.
“Somebody’s been watering,” she said quietly.
I had my house key in my coat pocket. I’d carried it fourteen hundred and eighty miles. I could feel the shape of it through the lining.
I knocked anyway.
A man who lets himself into his own house with a stranger inside is the man who ends up in Thursday’s sheriff’s log. And half the street was watching.
Besides, whoever was in there deserved the chance to come to the door with his pants on. My father taught me that. I suppose he taught it to me by always knocking.
Three knocks. Hard. But not angry.
Ardis stood beside me on the walk with her suitcase parked by my boots.
Through the glass of the storm door, I saw somebody come up the front hallway.
Not Brett.
A young man. Maybe late twenties. Dark T-shirt and jeans. His hair was all mussed up on one side, like he’d been asleep on the couch.
I’d never seen him before in my life.
He looked at me. He looked at Ardis beside me. He looked down at the suitcase by my boots.
Then he pushed open my storm door, and the cold came in around him.
“Can I help you folks?” he said.
“I’m Gordon Brekke,” I said. “This is my house.”
I watched it happen on his face.
First nothing. Then confusion. Then the color went right out of him. All at once. From his forehead down to his chin. Like somebody had pulled a plug.
“No,” he said. “No, sir. This is Brett’s house.”
“Brett is my son.”
“He said his folks gave it to him,” the young man said. His voice was getting faster. “He said you moved to Arizona for good. He said you signed it over to him when you retired.”
Behind me, I heard Ardis let out a long breath.
“We didn’t sign anything over to anybody,” I said. “We spend the winters in Mesa. We were due home in May.”
He put one hand flat on the door frame. Like he needed it to keep standing up.
“Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, man. Mr. Brekke, I am so sorry. I’m Austin. Austin Kessler. I’m Jade’s brother. I swear to God, I thought this was his place. I’ve been paying him on the first of every month. Cash, in an envelope. I’ve got a little notebook where I write it all down.”
“I believe you,” I said.
And I did. Nobody can fake that color.
“I’ll get out,” he said. “I’ll pack right now. I can be out of here tonight.”
“It’s March,” I said. “And it’s going to be nine degrees tonight. Nobody’s going anywhere tonight.”
He looked at me like I’d said something in Norwegian.
“Can we come in?” Ardis said from behind me. “My feet are cold.”
Austin jumped out of that doorway like the step had caught on fire.
“Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am. I’m sorry. Come in. It’s your house. I mean, I know it’s your house. Obviously. Come in.”
The house smelled like somebody else’s cooking.
Onions. And some kind of spice Ardis never used. Cumin, maybe. Not a bad smell. Just not ours.
There was a pair of women’s winter boots by the door. Small ones, with fake fur around the top. A pink fleece jacket hung on the hook where Ardis’s old barn coat usually hangs. And a great big new flat-screen television sat on the stand where our old one used to be.
But the place was clean. I’ll say that.
The kitchen counters were wiped down. The dishes were washed and put away. In the right cupboards, even. Somebody had polished the kitchen faucet until it shone.
Ardis walked straight past all of it. Straight to the front window. Straight to her violets.
She had about twenty of them on that stand. Some of them came from her mother. One came from a cutting her sister brought to the hospital the day Brett was born. Thirty-six years that one’s been going.
She cried, the first year we went to Arizona. About leaving those violets behind.
Every single one of them was alive.
Every single one was blooming.
The soil was damp, but not wet. And somebody had turned every pot, carefully, so the leaves would grow even toward the light.
Ardis reached out and touched one of the leaves with the back of her finger. Very gently. She didn’t say anything.
Behind her, on the windowsill, sat her mother’s old Christmas cactus in its chipped blue crock.
That cactus hadn’t bloomed in three years. Ardis had about given up on it.
It was covered in pink flowers.
“Well,” Ardis said, very softly. “Would you look at that.”
Austin was standing in the kitchen doorway with his hands jammed in his pockets, looking at the floor.
“Who’s been taking care of these?” I asked him.
“Brett,” he said. “Every Sunday. He won’t let anybody else touch them. Jade tried to water one once, and he about had a fit.”
I didn’t look at Ardis.
I don’t think either one of us could have stood it.
“Show me the basement,” I said.
Austin took me downstairs.
Our basement is an old Iowa basement. Half finished. Poured concrete walls. A shower stall I put in when Brett was in high school. The furnace and the water heater on one end. Ardis’s canning shelves on the other end, full of tomatoes and green beans and pickled beets.
Austin had set himself up in the finished half.
A cot. A dresser that used to be in Brett’s old bedroom. A folding card table with a laptop on it.
His steel-toed work boots were lined up neatly by the bottom of the stairs. There was a hard hat sitting on top of the dresser, with a sticker from the ethanol plant down the highway.
His clothes were folded. His bed was made tight enough to bounce a quarter off.
Over the cot, he’d thumbtacked one photograph to the wall. A woman about my age, standing in front of a white farmhouse, squinting into the sun.
“My mom,” he said, when he saw me looking at it. “She passed two years ago. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry, son.”
“She’d skin me alive,” he said, “if she knew I was living in somebody’s basement without them knowing. She’d drive down here from Charles City and pull me out by my ear.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have,” he said.
He sat down on the edge of the cot and rubbed his face with both hands.
“I should’ve asked to see something. A deed. Anything. But Brett’s a good guy, Mr. Brekke. He’s my sister’s guy. He said the house was his. Why would I think he’d lie about something like that?”
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“How long have you been at the ethanol plant?” I asked instead.
“Four years. Second shift, three to eleven. I’m off this week, though.” He looked up at me. “I lost my place in Mason City at Christmas. Landlord sold the whole building. Gave us thirty days, right before the holidays. Brett said I could stay here till I found something. Then he said six hundred a month would really help him out. And it was cheaper than anything I could find in the county. I didn’t think twice about it.”
He reached into the top drawer of the dresser and took out a little spiral notebook. The kind you buy at the drugstore for a dollar. He handed it to me.
On the first page, in careful block letters:
JANUARY 1 — $600 — PAID BRETT.
FEBRUARY 1 — $600 — PAID BRETT.
MARCH 1 — $600 — PAID BRETT.
“That’s yours,” he said. “If you need it. For proof or whatever.”
I handed it back to him.
“That’s yours,” I said. “You paid it.”
We went back upstairs.
Ardis had put the coffee on. She’d found her coffee can in a different cupboard than where she’d left it, and she’d moved it right back to the right one.
That’s how I knew she was going to be all right.
Jade came home at 3:20.
I heard her car before I saw it. An old Malibu with a tired muffler. She came in through the side door in her purple scrubs from the care center, already talking.
“Babe, did you get the…”
Then she saw us sitting at the kitchen table. And she stopped like she’d walked into a wall.
She was a small young woman. Dark hair pulled back tight. Tired eyes. Her name tag still hung from the pocket of her scrubs. JADE K., CNA.
She held her purse in front of her with both hands.
“Mrs. Brekke,” she said. “Mr. Brekke. Oh my gosh.”
“Sit down, honey,” Ardis said. “There’s coffee.”
Jade didn’t sit down.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Brett said you said it was okay. He said he called you at Christmas, and you said I could stay as long as we kept the house nice.”
“He didn’t call us about any such thing at Christmas,” Ardis said. “He called on Christmas Day for about four minutes and talked about the Hawkeyes.”
Jade’s face crumpled.
She sat down then. Right there on the chair by the side door. Still holding her purse in both hands.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew something was off. He wouldn’t let me answer the house phone. Not once. And he made Austin park out on the street that first week.” She looked over at her brother. “Did you know?”
“No,” Austin said. “I swear to you, Jadey.”
Ardis got up and poured a third cup of coffee. She set it down in front of Jade. Then she sat back down.
She didn’t say anything else for a while.
When Ardis stops talking, it’s because she’s deciding how much grace a person is going to get.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He drives for the feed mill in Garner some days,” Jade said. “When they call him. Today he’s out by Britt, hauling feed to the hog farms. He’ll be home about five-thirty.”
“Drives for the feed mill,” I said. “Since when?”
Jade looked at Austin. Austin looked at the table.
“Since December,” Jade said quietly. “Since the plant.”
“What plant?”
She looked at me for a long moment. And I watched her understand that I didn’t know. That we didn’t know anything. Anything at all.
“Oh, Mr. Brekke,” she said. “He didn’t tell you about the plant either?”
Brett had worked at the cabinet plant in Mason City for nine years.
He was a lead on the finishing line. He liked it there. He talked about it every Thanksgiving. The new spray booths. The guys on his crew. The time they finished a whole kitchen order for a hotel in Des Moines two days early.
On December 12th, Jade told us, the plant laid off its entire second shift.
Ninety-some people. Right before Christmas.
It ran in the Mason City paper. I read the paper online down in Arizona every morning. And I remember reading that exact story, at the little table in the park model, with my coffee.
I remember saying to Ardis, “Well, thank goodness Brett’s on days.”
He wasn’t on days.
He’d moved to second shift in October, for the extra dollar an hour.
He never mentioned it.
So I sat at my own kitchen table, at five o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in March, and I waited for my son.
The same way I used to wait for him when he was seventeen and had the car out past eleven.
Except at seventeen, I always knew exactly what I was going to say.
At five twenty-five, his truck came around the corner.
A blue Ram. Four years old. He’d been proud as anything of that truck when he bought it. Drove it over to show us before he even went home.
He saw the Toyota in the driveway.
I watched him see it. Through the front window. Past the violets.
The truck slowed down.
Then it stopped. Right in the middle of the street. With the engine still running.
He sat there.
One minute. Two.
I could see the shape of him behind the windshield. Both hands on top of the steering wheel. His forehead down against them.
Across the street, Vern stood at his front window and didn’t even pretend not to watch. Pam Henderson was out on her front step with a broom she wasn’t using. The Lindquist boy next door had stopped shooting baskets in his driveway and was just standing there holding the ball.
In a town that size, a man sitting in his truck in front of his folks’ house, with his head down on the steering wheel, is not a private thing.
The whole street had seen the Toyota pull in.
Now the whole street saw my son, unable to get out of his truck.
That was the first consequence. And I didn’t have to lift a finger for it.
Finally, he pulled up behind Austin’s pickup and shut the engine off.
He came up the walk slowly. In his feed mill jacket and the seed cap I’d given him two Christmases ago.
He didn’t use the side door. The way he had every single day of his whole life.
He came to the front door.
And he knocked.
I don’t know if he even knew he was doing it. My son knocked on the front door of the house he grew up in.
Ardis got up before I could. And she opened it.
He stood there on the stoop I built in 1994. He looked at his mother.
He was thirty-six years old. He had a little gray in his beard already.
And he looked eight.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “Come in. It’s cold.”
He came in. He saw Jade in the chair by the side door. He saw Austin standing in the kitchen doorway. He saw me, at the table.
He took off his cap and held it in both hands in front of him. The way I taught him to hold it in church.
“Dad,” he said. “I can explain.”
“I know you can,” I said. “That’s what worries me.”
That landed. I saw it land on his face.
I didn’t say it to hurt him. But I won’t pretend it didn’t.
Then I stood up and took my coat off the back of the chair.
“Put your cap back on,” I said. “We’re going for a drive.”
“Gordon,” Ardis said.
“Just a drive, Ardie,” I said. “Have supper on at seven. Make enough for five.”
Jade looked up at that.
So did Austin.
I drove him out to the co-op elevator on the east edge of town.
It’s about a mile and a half. Neither one of us said one word the whole way.
I parked by the scale house. Right where I’d parked nearly every working day for forty years. My old spot. Somebody had painted new lines, but I’d have found it blindfolded.
The tall concrete bins stood up white against a sky going pink in the west. The leg was quiet. In March, there’s not much moving at an elevator. Some corn going out on trucks. That’s about it.
I shut off the engine.
We sat there.
“I started here in 1979,” I said. “Shoveling out bins. Two dollars and ninety cents an hour.”
“I know, Dad.”
“In 1985, they came within one vote of closing this place down,” I said. “Half the farmers around here were going under. Banks taking farms every week. I was assistant manager by then. With a mortgage and a baby on the way and no savings. And I didn’t get paid for six weeks.”
Brett turned his head and looked at me.
He’d never heard that part. Nobody had. Nobody but Ardis.
“Your grandpa lent us four hundred dollars to make the house payment,” I said. “I never told a soul. I was so ashamed I couldn’t look him in the eye at church for a year. I paid him back. With interest he didn’t want. And I never once said thank you properly. Because saying it out loud would’ve meant admitting I needed it.”
Brett looked down at the cap in his hands.
“So I know a little something about not telling your father,” I said. “Now you tell me.”
He did.
It came out slow at first. Then all at once. The way water comes out of a frozen pipe when it finally lets go.
The layoff on December 12th. Three weeks of severance pay, and that was it.
The truck payment. Four hundred and twelve dollars a month.
Child support for Emma, his little girl. Three hundred and eighty dollars a month. And he had never been one single day late on it. Not once since the divorce. And he wasn’t about to start.
Unemployment covered some of it. The feed mill paid by the load, but only when they called. Some weeks they called four times. Some weeks they didn’t call at all.
Then Jade’s lease ran out. Then Austin lost his place in Mason City. Then Brett gave up his little apartment over the bakery to save the rent.
“And the house was just sitting there,” he said. His voice was rough. “Empty. Heat on low. And I thought, it’s three months. Austin pays six hundred. I keep up the truck and Emma’s money. I find a real job. And I put it all back the way it was before you ever come home in May. You’d never even know.”
“You told Austin we gave you the house,” I said.
“I know.” His voice broke right on it. “I know I did. He asked me if it was mine. Just asked, like it was nothing. And I just said yes. It was easier than the truth. Everything was easier than the truth, Dad. Everything.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He laughed. But there was nothing funny in it at all.
“Dad. You never missed a day of work in forty years. Not one. You’ve got a plaque in there on the wall with your name on it. How was I supposed to call you in Arizona and say, I’m thirty-six years old, and I lost my job, and I can’t make my truck payment?”
“You just say it.”
“You never said it,” he said quietly. “About Grandpa. Not for forty years.”
I sat there with that.
He was right. And we both knew it.
The sun went down a little more behind the bins. A pickup went by out on the county road with its lights on.
So I did the only thing I’ve ever known how to do.
I got out of the car.
“Where are you going?” Brett said.
“In there. Come on.”
Jeff Ostrander runs the elevator now. He was in the scale house finishing up the day’s tickets. I hired him myself, in 2001. A skinny kid out of the community college with a crew cut and a lot of questions.
He came around the counter and shook my hand like I was home from a war.
“Gordon! I thought you were down in Arizona till May!”
“Change of plans,” I said. “Jeff, are you still looking for spring help? Somebody who’ll show up?”
He looked past me, at Brett standing in the doorway.
“Always,” he said. “Fertilizer season starts in three weeks. Bins, loading, the dump pit, whatever comes up. Eighteen an hour. Overtime in the busy weeks.”
I didn’t say anything else.
I stepped aside.
That was the hardest thing I did that whole trip. Harder than fourteen hundred and eighty miles. Harder than Tucumcari.
I stood next to the old coffee pot, the same one that was there in 1985, and I kept my mouth shut. And I let my son ask for the job himself.
He did.
He took off his cap. And he asked Jeff Ostrander for work in a clear, steady voice. He told him straight out that he’d been laid off from the cabinet plant in December, and that he’d been driving part-time for the feed mill since.
He didn’t dress it up. He didn’t make excuses.
Jeff looked at him for a second. Then he said, “Can you be here Monday at seven?”
Brett said, “Yes, sir.”
On the drive back to the house, Brett didn’t say anything for most of the way.
Then, right as we turned onto our street, he said, “Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Did Grandpa know? That you were ashamed?”
I thought about my father. A big, quiet Norwegian with hands like shovels. Sitting in the third pew from the front at Our Savior’s every Sunday.
“I think he knew,” I said. “I think that’s why he never brought it up. Not once. Not even when I paid him back.”
Brett nodded slowly.
“I’m not going to do that,” he said. “Not bring it up. I’m going to say it. Thank you, Dad.”
I didn’t trust my voice to answer him. So I just reached over and squeezed the back of his neck. The way I did when he was little.
Ardis made pork chops and scalloped potatoes for five.
Nobody had much appetite. And everybody ate anyway. Because that’s what you do at Ardis’s table.
Halfway through supper, Brett put his fork down.
And he said it all again. Out loud. In front of everybody.
To Austin, especially. He looked right at him.
He said he was sorry for lying to him. That he’d had no right. That every bit of that eighteen hundred dollars had gone to a truck payment and a little girl’s child support, and not one penny to anything else. And that he’d pay back every dime of it to Austin out of his elevator checks.
Austin listened to the whole thing without interrupting. Then he shook his head.
“I had a room for three months,” Austin said. “Warm. Dry. Cheaper than anywhere in the county. I got exactly what I paid for, man. You don’t owe me.”
He looked over at Ardis and me.
“You owe them.”
After supper, Austin went downstairs. A few minutes later, he came back up with a white envelope. He set it down on the table, right in front of Ardis.
“I’ll be out a week from Saturday,” he said. “A guy at the plant has a camper I can rent till I find a place. That’s for this month.”
“You already paid this month,” Ardis said. “To Brett.”
“I paid Brett,” Austin said. “This is to you. For the heat. And the hot water. And the trouble.” He looked at the floor. “My mom would’ve wanted it that way.”
Ardis tried to give it back to him twice. He wouldn’t take it.
On the Saturday Austin left, he carried his cot and his folding table out to his black pickup himself. He wouldn’t let anybody help.
Then he came back up to the front stoop and shook my hand.
“Thank you, Mr. Brekke. For not calling the sheriff. For letting me stay. For all of it.”
“You’re welcome anytime, Austin,” I said. And I meant it.
Then he shook Brett’s hand.
He held on a second longer than he needed to.
“See you at the Casey’s,” he said.
“See you at the Casey’s,” Brett said.
Brett and Jade stayed with us at the house until the first of May. Brett in his old bedroom. Jade in the guest room. Very proper. Ardis’s idea.
Then they rented a little two-bedroom house over by the Lutheran church. And they pay the rent on it themselves. Every month. On time.
The week after we got home, Brett walked across the street to Vern’s house.
I saw him go up those steps. I saw Vern open the door.
He was in there almost an hour.
I never asked what was said. I never will.
But Vern has waved at him every single morning since.
A few days after we got home, Ardis was cleaning out the refrigerator. When she moved the magnets to wipe down the door, she found an index card stuck under the magnet next to mine.
Mine said, in my handwriting: Faucets on north wall below zero. Furnace filter. Walks.
Under it, there was a second card. In Brett’s handwriting.
Mom’s violets. Sunday. Not too much water. Turn them a quarter turn. Grandma’s cactus goes in the dark closet in October, like Mom does it.
Ardis sat down at the kitchen table holding that little card.
And she cried. For the first time since Vern called. For the first time in fourteen hundred and eighty miles.
I sat down beside her and held her hand.
“He was so afraid of letting us down,” she said, “that he kept every single one of them alive.”
Brett worked the whole spring season at the elevator. Fertilizer in April. Planting season in May. Then harvest in the fall.
He was there at six forty-five every morning. Fifteen minutes early. Jeff told me that himself, at the café, over pie.
“He’s a good worker, Gordon,” Jeff said. “Doesn’t complain. Doesn’t sit down. Reminds me of somebody.”
In October, after harvest, Jeff kept him on. Full time. With benefits.
Brett called us that night. On the phone.
And I want you to know something. He didn’t sound smooth. He didn’t sound cheerful. He didn’t say everything’s great, Dad.
He sounded like himself.
“Dad,” he said. “They kept me on. Full time.”
“I heard,” I said. “Jeff told me at the café.”
“Of course he did.” He laughed. “Of course he did.”
Then he was quiet for a second.
“Thank you, Dad,” he said. “For the drive. For standing by the coffee pot. For keeping your mouth shut.”
“That was the hard part,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I could tell.”
The first week of November came around. The maple out front had dropped all its leaves. The co-op bins were full. And the first real cold snap was coming down out of Minnesota.
Brett showed up at our door at six o’clock in the morning. With a duffel bag over his shoulder and a big green thermos of coffee.
He knocked. Even though he still had a key.
Ardis opened the door in her bathrobe.
“Go get your coats,” Brett said. “I’m driving.”
So our son drove us to Arizona that winter.
All fourteen hundred and eighty miles.
He drove the whole way. Payson to the Rim. Tucumcari. The Texas panhandle in the wind. Salina.
Somewhere past Liberal, Kansas, Ardis leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Brett, honey. Do you remember Biscuit?”
He laughed so hard he had to slow down.
“Four days in the garage,” he said. “I thought Dad was going to kill me.”
“I knew the whole time,” I said. “I heard him barking the first night.”
Brett looked over at me. Shocked.
“You knew? The whole time?”
“The whole time,” I said. “I was just waiting for you to tell me.”
He was quiet for a mile or two.
“That sounds about right,” he said finally.
He dropped us off at the park model with the green trim. He hung up the cardinal flag on the post for his mother. He set out the folding chairs.
And he flew home from Phoenix the next morning.
He watered his mother’s violets every Sunday until May.
And in October, he put Grandma’s Christmas cactus in the dark closet. Just like Ardis does it.
It bloomed again that Christmas.
He sent us a picture.
