She put her hand on the pencil marks again.
“I am eighty-eight years old,” she said. “I had made my peace that I would never stand in my mother’s kitchen again.”
She looked at Nate. Then at me.
“And you two children went and bought it with your own money. And told no one.”
She looked down at the tape on my thumbs.
“Whose money was it? Not Ronald’s.”
“No ma’am,” I said. “Ours. Two years of it.”
“I heard about the envelopes,” Opal said. “At Easter. I told Ronald at the time exactly what I thought about it. He said you two didn’t need it.”
“We didn’t need it,” Nate said quietly. “That’s not the same as not wanting to be thought of.”
Opal nodded. Once. The way you’d nod at a child who just got a hard math problem right.
Then she let me bring her the bucket. And she sat down on it, in her good navy dress, in the middle of her mother’s kitchen.
And Nate knelt down on that filthy floor and put his arms around her.
I went out onto the porch planks and looked at that red clump by the cistern for a while.
It was rhubarb.
Opal told me later. Her mother planted it there in 1931.
Opal told Ron herself.
I wasn’t there for it. All I know is what Judy told me afterward.
Opal telephoned their house Monday morning and said, “Ronald. You will drive me out to my father’s house on Saturday.”
And Ron sat down in the kitchen chair without pulling it out first. And nearly missed it.
They came at ten o’clock that Saturday.
I watched Ron’s truck slow down at the end of the lane. And stop there on the blacktop.
It sat there for what must have been a full minute before it turned in.
Ron Schafer was sixty-nine years old that year. A big, square man. A union carpenter for thirty-eight years.
He got out of the truck and helped his mother down. And then he just stood there in the yard.
He looked at the cistern. At the corner of the porch. At a place in the grass by the old machine shed where there was nothing at all to look at.
Judy had come too. She stood beside the truck with her hand pressed against her collarbone.
Nate came down off the ladder.
“Dad.”
“You bought it,” Ron said. “You bought this place. And you never said one word to me.”
“We didn’t know what it was. I swear to you. Nobody ever told me.”
“No,” Ron said. “I don’t guess anybody did.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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