Six years ago, my father lost his apartment over the hardware store on Main Street.
The building sold to a man from Louisville who wanted to redo the upstairs into something fancy. The new rent was almost double. Dad couldn’t pay it.
He was 60 then. He’d retired early from the foundry two counties over after thirty-one years, because his back finally gave out from lifting core boxes and the plant was offering a buyout. The buyout wasn’t much. His pension was less. Six hundred and eighty dollars a month, plus what Social Security would give him later.
He didn’t tell me he’d lost the apartment.
I found out from a man at the parts counter at the supply house. He leaned over the counter while he was ringing up my capacitors and said, kind of careful, like he was stepping around a hole, “Shane, I’ve seen your dad’s truck parked behind the VFW three mornings in a row. Everything all right?”
It wasn’t.
He was sleeping on a buddy’s couch, it turned out. And the buddy’s wife wanted him gone. My father was 60 years old with two duffel bags and a Silverado with 240,000 miles on it, and he hadn’t said one word to his only son.
I drove out to that buddy’s house after work. Dad was sitting on the front steps smoking a cigarette he’d quit twelve years earlier.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked him.
He flicked the ash. “Because you’d have done something about it.”
That was Dad. He’d rather sleep in a truck than let somebody see him need something.
That same spring, Aunt June died.
June was Dad’s aunt, his mother’s sister. She was 91. She went in her sleep in the little white house on Persimmon Street where she’d lived since 1958, with her African violets lined up on the windowsill and her porch swing painted fresh white.
June never had children of her own. She married late, to a widower with one grown son named Ron. When she passed, the house went to Ron. Ron lived in Ohio and didn’t want a house in southern Indiana.
He listed it at $72,000.
It needed a roof. The furnace was a 1987 model that I wouldn’t have let a customer run for one more winter. The house sat on the market for a month without a single offer.
So I called Ron.
I told him who I was. I told him my father needed somewhere to land, and that I couldn’t pay $72,000.
He was quiet for a minute. Then he said something I didn’t expect.
“June talked about you every Christmas,” he said. “Her little helper. The green bean boy.”
He took $64,000. I think he could have gotten more if he’d waited. I think he didn’t want to wait. And I think he wanted June’s house to go to somebody she knew.
Problem was, I didn’t have $64,000.
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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