- That afternoon, I went out to my truck and got the box that said June.
- Mom opened it at the kitchen table.
- Inside, wrapped in damp newspaper and set down in an old dishpan so they wouldn’t tip over, were six African violets in little clay pots. Purple ones and pink ones, and one white one with a blue edge around every petal.
- I knew that dishpan. It was the one we used to snap green beans in.
- “I took them after the funeral,” Mom said. “Nobody else wanted them. Ron was going to throw them out with the old magazines.”
- “You’ve had them six years?”
- “On my kitchen windowsill at the Meadowbrook.” She shook her head. “That window faces north, Shane. Do you know how hard it is to keep a violet alive in a north window for six years? I talked to them every morning, the way June used to. I felt like a fool.”
- She carried them one at a time into the front bedroom. She set them on the windowsill in a row, exactly the way June used to have them. The morning light had moved off the room by then, but you could see just how it would land on them tomorrow.
- Dad came and stood in the bedroom doorway. He didn’t come in. He looked at those violets for a long time.
- “Those are June’s,” he said.
- “They are.”
- “You kept June’s violets.”
- “Somebody had to.”
- He put his hand on the door frame. I saw his jaw working.
- Then he turned around and walked out to the garage. We heard him out there for an hour, moving his old foundry boxes around. Neither one of us went out after him.
- I won’t tell you any of it was easy.
- They’d been married nineteen years and divorced for twenty. They had a long list of reasons why.
- The first week, Mom put a list on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a cardinal.
- Kitchen after 7 p.m. is hers. Bathroom before 6 a.m. is his. Front room television is hers on Wednesdays for her show. Nobody touches anybody else’s coffee.
- Dad read it standing at the fridge with his reading glasses on the end of his nose.
- Then he took a pen out of the junk drawer and added one line at the bottom, in his blocky foundry handwriting.
- Nobody moves the swing.
- Mom read it the next morning. She didn’t say anything.
- But she left it up.
- There was one more thing we had to settle, and I knew it had to be on paper this time. Six years of handshakes and silence had gotten us right where we were.
- The second week of November, I asked Mom and Dad to meet me at the office of a lawyer named Paul Brandt, over on the courthouse square. Paul had done our wills a few years back. He charged me $250 for an hour, and it was the best $250 I ever spent.
- We sat in three chairs in front of his desk. Dad kept his barn coat on the whole time, like he might need to leave in a hurry.
- Paul had drawn up a simple written agreement. Nothing fancy. Two pages.
- It said Dennis Kolb could live at the Persimmon Street house for as long as he wanted, as an occupant with the permission of the two owners. It said he’d pay the gas and electric bills himself, starting January 1st. It said nobody else could move in without both owners agreeing in writing. And it said the owners couldn’t ask him to leave without ninety days’ written notice.
- Paul read it out loud, every word. Then he slid it across the desk.
- “Mr. Kolb,” he said to Dad, “this protects you as much as it protects them. Probably more.”
- Dad read it twice. His lips moved a little when he got to the part about ninety days.
- “They could put me out tomorrow without this,” he said slowly. “Couldn’t they.”
- Paul didn’t answer that directly. He just said, “Your son asked me to make sure nobody could do anything to anybody in a hurry. Including you.”
- Dad looked at me for a long moment.
- Then he took the pen and signed his name.
- Mom signed. I signed. Paul’s secretary notarized all three signatures with a heavy stamp that went chunk on the paper.
- Out on the sidewalk afterward, Dad stood with his hands in his coat pockets.
- “First time in six years I’ve had a piece of paper that says I live somewhere,” he said.
- “First time you ever asked for one,” Mom said.
- He almost smiled.
- He’d gone to Miller Lumber the Monday after Tammy left and filled out an application. The yard manager was a man named Dale, who I’d gone to high school with.
- Dale called me that night.
- “Your dad came in today,” he said. “He said to tell you he applied, so you wouldn’t have to hear it from somebody else first. Is he going to be all right on a forklift?”
- “He drove one for thirty-one years.”
- “That’s what he said. He also said his back’s no good for lifting, and he’d tell me straight if it got bad.” Dale paused. “I appreciated that. Most guys his age lie about it.”
