Vern Dahl called on a Wednesday afternoon in February. And the first thing he said was, “Gordon, I hate to bother you down there.”
I was standing outside our rented park model in Mesa, Arizona, with a cup of coffee going lukewarm in my hand. It was eighty-one degrees. Somebody two lots over was playing a Charley Pride record on a little radio.
Vern is seventy-five. He’s lived across the street from us in Iowa since 1981.
And Vern does not call Arizona to talk about the weather. Because the weather in Iowa in February is not news.
“You’re no bother, Vern,” I said. “Is the house all right? Did a pipe go?”
“The house is fine,” he said. “That’s not it.”
Then he went quiet. Quiet so long I pulled the phone away from my ear and checked whether the call had dropped.
“Gordon,” he said. “There’s a fella living in your basement.”
I set my coffee down on the little railing by the step. I remember that, because a grackle landed right next to it, bold as you please, and I didn’t even shoo it.
“Brett’s girlfriend moved in around Christmas,” Vern went on. “The girl with the dark hair. Works over at the care center. That part I figured you knew about. But now her brother’s in there too. Since the first of the year.”
“In the house,” I said.
“In the basement. He told me so himself at the Casey’s. Nice enough young man. Polite. Said he pays Brett six hundred dollars a month for it, and it’s the best deal in the county.”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
Vern let me not say anything. That’s one of the reasons he’s been my neighbor for forty-five years.
“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.
