I was 33 years old. I was a heating and air tech for Rick Hollis Heating and Air. I had a mortgage of my own and a wife who was still paying on her nursing school loans.
I could get half.
I went to the credit union and took out a home equity loan for $32,000 against our own house. Seven-year term. $468 a month.
Amy signed for it at our kitchen table without making me explain it twice. She just looked at the papers, looked at me, and picked up the pen.
“He’s your dad,” she said. “And June was June.”
I paid that loan off in five years of Saturday side jobs. Furnace tune-ups for widows. Ductwork in basements. A whole summer of window units for a church camp. Five years of Saturdays.
The other half came from my mother.
People always ask about that part when they hear the story. Why would a woman who’d been divorced from a man for fourteen years put $32,000 of her own money into a house so he’d have a place to sleep?
There are a few answers. All of them are true.
The first one is Aunt June.
When I was little, Mom was waiting tables at the diner and Dad was on day shift at the foundry. It was June who watched me every summer. June had that porch swing, painted white, and she’d sit me on it with a dishpan full of green beans between us and teach me how to snap them.
She called me her helper. She paid me a quarter a pan.
When my parents fought, which was most of my childhood, it was June’s house I got sent to. When they finally split, the year I turned 19, June was the one who drove over to Mom’s apartment with a casserole and sat with her at the kitchen table until it got dark.
“June was more family to me than anybody in the whole Kolb line,” Mom told me once. Then she patted my hand. “Present company excepted.”
The second answer is that my mother is a practical woman.
She’d worked twenty-seven years in a school cafeteria. She had $41,000 in savings from three decades of clipping coupons and working banquets on the weekends. And she did the math.
She’d retire someday. Her rent kept going up. A paid-for house on a quiet street, a house she’d loved since before I was born, was the best place she could think of to put money she would someday need.
“Your daddy can stay there until he’s on his feet,” she told me. “And when I retire, I’ll want it. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
The third answer is the one she’d never say out loud.
She didn’t want the father of her son sleeping in a truck behind the VFW.
She wasn’t in love with him. She hadn’t been in love with him for a very long time. But she wasn’t cruel. My mother has never been cruel to anybody in her life.
We closed on it in May at Hoosier Title Company, in a little conference room with a bowl of peppermints on the table.
The closing agent was a woman named Carol with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She slid the warranty deed across the table and showed us where to sign.
“Grantees,” she said, tapping the page. “Shane Kolb and Linda Kolb. Tenants in common, equal shares. That right?”
“That’s right,” Mom said.
Carol had it recorded at the county the following Tuesday. They mailed us each a copy. Mine went into the gray fireproof box in our bedroom closet with our marriage license and the kids’ birth certificates.
Dad’s name wasn’t on the deed. There was never a lease. There was never any rent. Not one dollar, ever.
He moved in the first week of June. He said thank you once, in the driveway, without looking at either one of us.
Then he went inside and shut the door.
I want to be fair to my father. He’s my father, and he’s not a bad man. He’s a man who’s been disappointed by almost everything in his life, and who learned early to be the first one to walk away.
He kept the yard mowed. He kept the gutters clean. He fixed the drip in June’s bathroom sink with a washer from his own coffee can of washers. He repainted the porch swing every single spring. He didn’t tear the place up.
But he didn’t pay for it, either.
Mom paid half the property taxes, about $350 a year. I paid the other half, plus the homeowner’s insurance, $940 a year with Indiana Farm Mutual.
And most months, right around the twentieth, my phone would ring.
“Running a little short this month, bud.”
It was never a lot. Eighty dollars. A hundred and ten in January. A hundred and forty that February we had the ice storm.
I paid it because he was my father. And because it was easier to pay it than to listen to him not ask for it.
Six years of that is a lot of Januarys.
Mom never once went to the house in those six years. Not one time. When Dad moved in, she said it was his to live in until it was hers, and she wasn’t going to be the ex-wife standing in his kitchen.
But she’d ask me about it. Whether the lilac by the back step had bloomed. Whether he’d kept the porch swing painted. Whether the front bedroom still got the morning light.
I always said yes. Because it did.
That front bedroom has two windows on the east side. In the morning, the sun comes through June’s old lace curtains and lands on the floor in little flowers.
Mom would close her eyes when I told her that. Like she could see it.
