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

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.