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.”
