He took the big TV down. In the second summer, he hung Mother’s wedding portrait back over the fireplace. I’d left it for him in a box in the garage with a note: It belongs there. He never mentioned it. But the next time I came for dinner, it was on the wall.
I stood in the living room in the lamplight, looking up at her. A young woman in a high-necked white dress, squinting slightly, one hand on my father’s arm.
“She looks like you,” Dale said.
“She looks like you.”
“I think she looks like both of us.”
He cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at me. “Annie, would you like to move back? Into the house. The back bedroom. You wouldn’t pay rent. I’d like it.” He was studying his boots. “It’s too big for one person. And I’m no good at it. I don’t even know where the good dishes are.”
“They’re in the cabinet over the refrigerator.”
“See? I didn’t know that.”
I laughed, warm and sudden and surprised. “Dale.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” I took off my glasses and wiped them on my cardigan. “Let me think about it. I’d like to keep the bungalow for now. I like my crabapple tree.”
“Sure.”
“But I’ll come for Sunday dinner. Every week. On one condition.”
“Anything.”
“You cook.”
He groaned. I grinned. And we stood together in the lamplight of the house where we grew up, under a portrait of our parents, laughing.
I think about the north fence line most mornings.
I walk it at first light with my coffee, the way Dad did. In spring, the orange pin caps show up bright against the new green. In fall, they disappear into the stubble, and I find them by feel with the toe of my boot. Thirty-one of them, a hundred and twenty feet apart, under the wide, pale, unbroken Nebraska sky.
Some mornings I stop at the gate, put my hand on the cedar post, and think a few words. Not out loud.
I found them, Dad. I found every one.
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