I told her everything Vern said.
The girlfriend, whose name was Jade. The brother, whose name Vern thought was Austin. The basement. The six hundred dollars a month.
Ardis sat down on the step beside me.
She didn’t cry. She took the towel off her neck and folded it into a square on her knees. Very neat. Then she folded it again. Then again.
“Six hundred dollars,” she said. “For our basement. With the sump pump that hollers every time it rains.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Since January.”
“That’s what he said.”
She looked out across the lot at the lemon tree, where our neighbor from Mankato was picking lemons into an old coffee can.
“What are you going to do, Gordon?”
I’d like to tell you I had a plan right then. I didn’t.
What I had was a list of things I wasn’t going to do. And that list got longer and longer as the evening went on.
The first thing I thought about was the sheriff.
I thought about it for about a minute.
I knew exactly how that call would go. I’ve known the Winnebago County deputies most of their lives. Dale Herman would come out. He’d be kind about it. And he’d tell me what I already knew.
A grown man who’s been paying rent every month and keeping his things in a basement isn’t a burglar. Even if he paid it to the wrong person. That’s a civil matter. You give written notice. You wait. Nobody gets carried out into an Iowa March by a deputy just because his landlord turned out to be somebody’s son.
And even if the law was simple, I wasn’t going to do it.
I wasn’t going to send a man in uniform to my own son’s door. Not in a town of twenty-two hundred people. Where the sheriff’s log runs in the paper every Thursday, and it gets read out loud at the café before it ever gets read at home.
That night, we sat at the little table in the park model with a plate of saltine crackers nobody was eating.
“Call Brett,” Ardis said. “Just call him. Ask him.”
“And he’ll tell me what?”
“The truth, maybe.”
“On the phone?” I shook my head. “He’ll have a story ready before the second ring. And then he’ll have two days to empty out that basement and hide the whole thing. He’s had since Christmas to get one ready.”
Ardis didn’t like that. And she was right not to like it. It was a hard thing to say about our son.
But I’ve known Brett for thirty-six years. And on the telephone, he has always been somebody else. Smooth. Cheerful. Everything’s great, Dad. Everything’s fine.
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