We turned onto our street on Tuesday at two-thirty in the afternoon.
Our town has one stoplight. Two churches with white steeples you can see from the county road. A Casey’s. A café. And the co-op elevator on the east edge of town that you can see from six miles out, in any direction.
Our house is a low ranch house with cream-colored siding and a wooden front stoop I rebuilt myself in 1994. It sits on a street full of houses just like it. Where everybody knows everybody else’s car.
The snow piles along the curb were gray with road salt and gravel. The big maple in our front yard was bare.
And there was a black Chevy pickup I’d never seen before in my life, parked right at the curb in front of our house. Like it lived there.
Brett’s blue truck was nowhere.
Across the street, Vern’s front curtain moved. Next door to him, Pam Henderson’s curtain moved too.
By the time I pulled our old tan Toyota into the driveway, I’d guess at least six households on that street knew Gordon and Ardis Brekke were home two months early.
The Toyota had fourteen hundred miles of road grime up both sides. I hadn’t had the heart to stop and wash it.
Ardis got out. She went around to the trunk and took out her rolling suitcase. Just the one. And she wheeled it up the front walk to my side.
She didn’t need it. Everything else was still in the trunk.
I think she just needed something to hold on to.
We walked up the front walk together. Somebody had shoveled it. And salted it. Clean all the way down to the concrete.
Through the big front window, I could see Ardis’s African violets. On the white plant stand where she always kept them. Purple ones and white ones, all crowded together.
Still blooming. In March.
Ardis stopped dead on the walk and looked at them.
“Somebody’s been watering,” she said quietly.
I had my house key in my coat pocket. I’d carried it fourteen hundred and eighty miles. I could feel the shape of it through the lining.
I knocked anyway.
A man who lets himself into his own house with a stranger inside is the man who ends up in Thursday’s sheriff’s log. And half the street was watching.
Besides, whoever was in there deserved the chance to come to the door with his pants on. My father taught me that. I suppose he taught it to me by always knocking.
Three knocks. Hard. But not angry.
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