“Tammy and her boys are moving in Saturday,” Dad said.
He said it the way a man tells you the weather. His fork was still in his green beans. He didn’t even look up.
We were sitting at Aunt June’s kitchen table, the yellow one with the chrome legs, on a Tuesday night in October. I’d stopped by after my last service call of the day to look at the pilot light on the water heater. I still had my work jacket on, and my hands still smelled like copper and flux.
I set my coffee cup down very carefully. I didn’t trust what my hand might do with it.
“Moving in where?” I said.
“Here.” He pointed his fork at the ceiling, at the walls, at the whole little house. “Tammy, Kyle and Travis. Saturday morning. She’s renting a truck. I figured you’d want to know before you came by and found strangers in the hall.”
Tammy Reese was Dad’s girlfriend of eight months. I’d met her twice. She was 58, worked the deli counter at the grocery store in town, and laughed loud at things that weren’t all that funny. Her boys were 31 and 28. I had nothing against her.
“Dad,” I said, “there are two bedrooms in this house.”
“Kyle can have the front room once I clear it out. Travis can take the couch till he gets on his feet. Tammy’s with me.” He shrugged. “People have lived in smaller.”
“And who’s paying the gas bill when there are four grown people running that furnace all winter?”
He didn’t even lift his eyes from his plate.
“You always have,” he said.
I sat there with that.
It was true. That was the worst part. It was completely true, and he said it like it was something about me instead of something about him.
“Dad,” I said slowly. “Mom and I bought this house.”
“I know who bought it.” Now he looked up. His eyes were hard. “You and your mother bought it so you could feel good about yourselves. I’ve lived here six years, Shane. It’s my house. Don’t make it my problem now that I finally got somebody.”
He got up. He scraped his plate into the trash. He ran water over it in the sink.
That was the end of the conversation as far as he was concerned. It had always been that way with Dad. He said the thing, and then he walked off from it and left you standing in the middle of it.
I went down the basement stairs and looked at the pilot light. It was fine. It had always been fine.
I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, and the whole way I kept hearing it.
It’s my house.
There were two names on the deed to that house. I’d watched them both get signed at a title company six years earlier. Neither one of them was his.
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