He took the big TV down. In the second summer, he hung Mother’s wedding portrait back over the fireplace. I’d left it for him in a box in the garage with a note: It belongs there. He never mentioned it. But the next time I came for dinner, it was on the wall.
I stood in the living room in the lamplight, looking up at her. A young woman in a high-necked white dress, squinting slightly, one hand on my father’s arm.
“She looks like you,” Dale said.
“She looks like you.”
“I think she looks like both of us.”
He cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at me. “Annie, would you like to move back? Into the house. The back bedroom. You wouldn’t pay rent. I’d like it.” He was studying his boots. “It’s too big for one person. And I’m no good at it. I don’t even know where the good dishes are.”
“They’re in the cabinet over the refrigerator.”
“See? I didn’t know that.”
I laughed, warm and sudden and surprised. “Dale.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” I took off my glasses and wiped them on my cardigan. “Let me think about it. I’d like to keep the bungalow for now. I like my crabapple tree.”
“Sure.”
“But I’ll come for Sunday dinner. Every week. On one condition.”
“Anything.”
“You cook.”
He groaned. I grinned. And we stood together in the lamplight of the house where we grew up, under a portrait of our parents, laughing.
I think about the north fence line most mornings.
I walk it at first light with my coffee, the way Dad did. In spring, the orange pin caps show up bright against the new green. In fall, they disappear into the stubble, and I find them by feel with the toe of my boot. Thirty-one of them, a hundred and twenty feet apart, under the wide, pale, unbroken Nebraska sky.
Some mornings I stop at the gate, put my hand on the cedar post, and think a few words. Not out loud.
I found them, Dad. I found every one.
Last October, I was out there at dawn with a bucket of my own. The plastic streamers on the marker flags along the strip had faded, and Dale had asked me to replace them. I’d bought a fresh box of orange flags, the little wire kind, at the hardware store in Alma for $11.
I was kneeling at pin nineteen with a flag in my fist when I heard a truck.
It was Dale’s. Not a rental anymore, but Dad’s old blue Ford pickup, which he’d had rebuilt that summer at a shop in Holdrege for $3,400. He parked at the gate and climbed down in a canvas coat and Dad’s old seed cap, which I’d given him for his birthday. He came slowly across the stubble carrying a thermos and knelt down beside me.
For a while, neither of us said anything. The sun was coming up red over the cottonwoods. A pair of Canada geese flew low overhead, calling.
“Dad used to say a chain is sixty-six feet,” Dale said at last.
“Four rods. Eighty to the mile.”
“Easy to count.”
“Easy to divide.”
He poured coffee into the thermos lid and handed it to me. It was hot and black and tasted like metal.
“He said it to me once,” Dale said. “In 1983. In the yard, the morning I left. I thought he was just talking.”
I looked at him.
“He said, ‘Son, everything out here is built on a chain. Sixty-six feet. And a man’s a lot like a road. He’s got to have a right-of-way to get home.’”
My throat closed.
“I didn’t know what he meant,” Dale said. “I was eighteen.” He turned the cup in his hands. “I think I know now.”
I pushed the flag into the ground at pin nineteen. It was orange and bright, bobbing in the cold wind.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
He looked down the long line of caps running east toward the sun, all thirty-one of them, glowing like small coals in the dew.
“That he left it open,” my brother said.
We stayed there a long time, kneeling in the stubble and passing the cup back and forth, while the light came up gold across four hundred acres of Dekker ground and a meadowlark sang on the fence. Nobody said a word.
Nobody had to. The gate was open.
It had been all along.
