My mother didn’t take her coat off.
That was the first thing I noticed.
She sat down at my kitchen table on a Tuesday night in March with her purse still hooked over her arm. Like she might need to leave in a hurry.
Dad sat down next to her with his seed cap in his lap. He turned it around and around by the bill. The same way he used to in the pew at church when the sermon ran long.
“We won’t keep you,” Mom said. “You’ve got the route in the morning.”
“I’ve got coffee on,” I said. “Stay as long as you want.”
My husband, Dale, was sitting at the end of the table in his barn socks. He’d come in from the hog barns twenty minutes earlier, showered, and he was still pink around the ears.
He nodded at my folks. He didn’t say anything.
Dale doesn’t say anything unless it needs saying.
I poured three cups of coffee. I set the sugar bowl in front of Mom, because she takes two spoons, and I set a plate of bars in the middle of the table. Scotcheroos. Nobody touched them.
Mom looked at Dad.
Dad looked at his cap.
“It’s about Jeff,” Mom said.
I’d figured that. Everything that whole winter had been about Jeff.
My little brother is forty-three years old. The second week of January, his wife Amber packed up her car and drove to Sioux Falls. She told him she’d been unhappy for six years. Six years, and he never knew.
She left him the kids. She left him the bills. And she left him the lease on a rental house in town that the landlord was selling right out from under them.
Since February, Jeff and his three kids had been living in my parents’ basement.
Brody is twelve. Kenzie is nine. Cole is six.
They were sleeping on air mattresses. Right next to Dad’s deer mounts and the big white chest freezer.
“Those kids can’t keep living like that, Tammy,” Mom said. “Cole wet the bed twice last week. Twice. And Kenzie cries in the bathroom with the fan running so her dad won’t hear her.”
“I know, Mom.”
“So your father and I have been talking.”
She took a breath. She held on to her purse strap with both hands.
“We’d like you to sell us the house back. For a dollar. The same way we sold it to you. So Jeff can have it.”
Down in the basement, the furnace kicked on. I could hear it hum up through the floor register by my feet.
It was a good furnace.
I knew exactly what it cost.
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