While We Wintered in Arizona, Our Son Moved His Girlfriend Into Our House and Rented Our Basement for $600 So We Came Home Two Months Early

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.