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

We went back upstairs.

Ardis had put the coffee on. She’d found her coffee can in a different cupboard than where she’d left it, and she’d moved it right back to the right one.

That’s how I knew she was going to be all right.

Jade came home at 3:20.

I heard her car before I saw it. An old Malibu with a tired muffler. She came in through the side door in her purple scrubs from the care center, already talking.

“Babe, did you get the…”

Then she saw us sitting at the kitchen table. And she stopped like she’d walked into a wall.

She was a small young woman. Dark hair pulled back tight. Tired eyes. Her name tag still hung from the pocket of her scrubs. JADE K., CNA.

She held her purse in front of her with both hands.

“Mrs. Brekke,” she said. “Mr. Brekke. Oh my gosh.”

“Sit down, honey,” Ardis said. “There’s coffee.”

Jade didn’t sit down.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Brett said you said it was okay. He said he called you at Christmas, and you said I could stay as long as we kept the house nice.”

“He didn’t call us about any such thing at Christmas,” Ardis said. “He called on Christmas Day for about four minutes and talked about the Hawkeyes.”

Jade’s face crumpled.

She sat down then. Right there on the chair by the side door. Still holding her purse in both hands.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew something was off. He wouldn’t let me answer the house phone. Not once. And he made Austin park out on the street that first week.” She looked over at her brother. “Did you know?”

“No,” Austin said. “I swear to you, Jadey.”

Ardis got up and poured a third cup of coffee. She set it down in front of Jade. Then she sat back down.

She didn’t say anything else for a while.

When Ardis stops talking, it’s because she’s deciding how much grace a person is going to get.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He drives for the feed mill in Garner some days,” Jade said. “When they call him. Today he’s out by Britt, hauling feed to the hog farms. He’ll be home about five-thirty.”

“Drives for the feed mill,” I said. “Since when?”

Jade looked at Austin. Austin looked at the table.

“Since December,” Jade said quietly. “Since the plant.”

“What plant?”

She looked at me for a long moment. And I watched her understand that I didn’t know. That we didn’t know anything. Anything at all.

“Oh, Mr. Brekke,” she said. “He didn’t tell you about the plant either?”

Brett had worked at the cabinet plant in Mason City for nine years.

He was a lead on the finishing line. He liked it there. He talked about it every Thanksgiving. The new spray booths. The guys on his crew. The time they finished a whole kitchen order for a hotel in Des Moines two days early.

On December 12th, Jade told us, the plant laid off its entire second shift.

Ninety-some people. Right before Christmas.

It ran in the Mason City paper. I read the paper online down in Arizona every morning. And I remember reading that exact story, at the little table in the park model, with my coffee.

I remember saying to Ardis, “Well, thank goodness Brett’s on days.”

He wasn’t on days.

He’d moved to second shift in October, for the extra dollar an hour.

He never mentioned it.

So I sat at my own kitchen table, at five o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in March, and I waited for my son.

The same way I used to wait for him when he was seventeen and had the car out past eleven.

Except at seventeen, I always knew exactly what I was going to say.

At five twenty-five, his truck came around the corner.

A blue Ram. Four years old. He’d been proud as anything of that truck when he bought it. Drove it over to show us before he even went home.

He saw the Toyota in the driveway.

I watched him see it. Through the front window. Past the violets.

The truck slowed down.

Then it stopped. Right in the middle of the street. With the engine still running.

He sat there.

One minute. Two.

I could see the shape of him behind the windshield. Both hands on top of the steering wheel. His forehead down against them.

Across the street, Vern stood at his front window and didn’t even pretend not to watch. Pam Henderson was out on her front step with a broom she wasn’t using. The Lindquist boy next door had stopped shooting baskets in his driveway and was just standing there holding the ball.

In a town that size, a man sitting in his truck in front of his folks’ house, with his head down on the steering wheel, is not a private thing.

The whole street had seen the Toyota pull in.

Now the whole street saw my son, unable to get out of his truck.

That was the first consequence. And I didn’t have to lift a finger for it.

Finally, he pulled up behind Austin’s pickup and shut the engine off.

He came up the walk slowly. In his feed mill jacket and the seed cap I’d given him two Christmases ago.

He didn’t use the side door. The way he had every single day of his whole life.

He came to the front door.

And he knocked.

I don’t know if he even knew he was doing it. My son knocked on the front door of the house he grew up in.

Ardis got up before I could. And she opened it.

He stood there on the stoop I built in 1994. He looked at his mother.

He was thirty-six years old. He had a little gray in his beard already.

And he looked eight.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

“Hi, honey,” she said. “Come in. It’s cold.”

He came in. He saw Jade in the chair by the side door. He saw Austin standing in the kitchen doorway. He saw me, at the table.

He took off his cap and held it in both hands in front of him. The way I taught him to hold it in church.

“Dad,” he said. “I can explain.”

“I know you can,” I said. “That’s what worries me.”

That landed. I saw it land on his face.

I didn’t say it to hurt him. But I won’t pretend it didn’t.

Then I stood up and took my coat off the back of the chair.

“Put your cap back on,” I said. “We’re going for a drive.”

“Gordon,” Ardis said.

“Just a drive, Ardie,” I said. “Have supper on at seven. Make enough for five.”

Jade looked up at that.

So did Austin.