We closed on it in May at Hoosier Title Company, in a little conference room with a bowl of peppermints on the table.
The closing agent was a woman named Carol with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She slid the warranty deed across the table and showed us where to sign.
“Grantees,” she said, tapping the page. “Shane Kolb and Linda Kolb. Tenants in common, equal shares. That right?”
“That’s right,” Mom said.
Carol had it recorded at the county the following Tuesday. They mailed us each a copy. Mine went into the gray fireproof box in our bedroom closet with our marriage license and the kids’ birth certificates.
Dad’s name wasn’t on the deed. There was never a lease. There was never any rent. Not one dollar, ever.
He moved in the first week of June. He said thank you once, in the driveway, without looking at either one of us.
Then he went inside and shut the door.
I want to be fair to my father. He’s my father, and he’s not a bad man. He’s a man who’s been disappointed by almost everything in his life, and who learned early to be the first one to walk away.
He kept the yard mowed. He kept the gutters clean. He fixed the drip in June’s bathroom sink with a washer from his own coffee can of washers. He repainted the porch swing every single spring. He didn’t tear the place up.
But he didn’t pay for it, either.
Mom paid half the property taxes, about $350 a year. I paid the other half, plus the homeowner’s insurance, $940 a year with Indiana Farm Mutual.
And most months, right around the twentieth, my phone would ring.
“Running a little short this month, bud.”
It was never a lot. Eighty dollars. A hundred and ten in January. A hundred and forty that February we had the ice storm.
I paid it because he was my father. And because it was easier to pay it than to listen to him not ask for it.
Six years of that is a lot of Januarys.
Mom never once went to the house in those six years. Not one time. When Dad moved in, she said it was his to live in until it was hers, and she wasn’t going to be the ex-wife standing in his kitchen.
But she’d ask me about it. Whether the lilac by the back step had bloomed. Whether he’d kept the porch swing painted. Whether the front bedroom still got the morning light.
I always said yes. Because it did.
That front bedroom has two windows on the east side. In the morning, the sun comes through June’s old lace curtains and lands on the floor in little flowers.
Mom would close her eyes when I told her that. Like she could see it.
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