My Kids Took My House Keys at Christmas. The Locksmith They Called Was My Granddaughter.

Part 4: February

The house did not sell in February.

The house did not sell.

Marcus and Jennifer flew home on the 28th. Kate stayed an extra four days, which she had not planned to do, and on the third of those days she and I drove out to the cemetery and stood at Ray’s stone and she cried and I let her, and I didn’t say anything smart or forgiving, because I wasn’t ready to, and Ray of all people would have understood that.

At the cemetery she said, “Doug.”

I said, “What about him.”

“Is he nice to you.”

“He’s nice enough. He’s not your father.”

“Nobody’s my father.”

“No.”

We stood there in the cold.

“Mom,” she said. “I’ve been a bad daughter this year.”

“You’ve been a busy daughter.”

“That’s not the same thing but it’s not different enough.”

“No.”

“I’m going to work on it.”

“Okay.”

I did not tell her it was fine. Because it wasn’t fine, and Kate at forty-six was old enough to sit inside a thing that wasn’t fine and not need her mother to smooth it over.

She flew back to Denver on the 30th. She called me on Sunday, January 5, at 4:45, forty-five minutes after Hazel, and she has called almost every Sunday since. Not every one. Almost.

Marcus was harder.

Marcus sent me a long email on January 2 that I did not read for six days because I was not ready. When I did read it, it was better than I expected and not as good as it needed to be. He apologized for the folder. He apologized for the key. He did not apologize for Sycamore Grove, which he still, I could tell between the lines, thought had been a reasonable idea presented in an unreasonable way.

I wrote back three sentences. *Marcus. Thank you for the email. We’ll talk when I’m ready.*

I made him wait three weeks.

When I called him it was a Tuesday night in late January and he picked up on the first ring, which told me everything about how those three weeks had felt on his end. We talked for an hour and eleven minutes. Some of it was hard. Some of it was easier than I expected. Near the end he asked me if I would ever come visit them in Chicago, and I said, not yet, and he said, okay, and did not push. That was the part where I understood he had actually learned something.

Jennifer sent a card. It was a nice card. I have not written back yet. I might. I might not. Ray would have said give her time, and he would have meant give myself time, and he would have been right.

Hazel came for a week in March.

She drove down in her truck with her toolbox and her dog, a lanky brown mutt named Wrench, which she had not mentioned on any Sunday call and which surprised me at my own door. She stayed in her old room, which was Kate’s old room, which had been repainted twice since Kate lived in it but still had the ceiling fan Kate had picked out at fourteen.

We ate breakfast together every morning for seven days.

On the third morning she said, “Grandma. Can I ask you something.”

“Yes.”

“When Grandpa put the house in your name in 2009. Did you know then that it was going to matter someday.”

I thought about it.

Outside, Wrench was barking at a squirrel on the back fence, and the light was coming in the kitchen window at the angle it comes in only in March, and I could hear the furnace click on the way it clicks when it’s cold but not really cold.

“I knew,” I said, “that Ray was scared. And I knew he was doing something he had thought about for a long time. I didn’t know why he was so worried. I thought he was just sick and scared.”

“But he was worried about them.”

“He was worried, I think, that when he was gone I’d get quiet. He said once, near the end, that women get quiet after their husbands die and their children take it as permission.”

She was still.

“He wasn’t wrong about a lot of things,” I said. “It’s annoying.”

She laughed.

“He would have liked you being a locksmith,” I said.

“You think?”

“He liked women who could open things.”

She laughed again and then, in the middle of the laugh, her face did the thing faces do when they’re about to cry, and she got up from the table and came around to my chair and put her arms around my neck from behind and pressed her face into the top of my head, and neither of us said anything for a while.

Wrench barked at the squirrel.

The furnace clicked off.

Later, after she went home to Portland, I stood in my kitchen and I looked at the red front door through the doorway from the hall, and I thought about Ray sitting at this table in 2009 with his hands shaking on a pen, signing over a house he loved to a woman he loved, because he had known something about our son that I had not wanted to know until it happened.

I thought: he trusted me to know when it was time.

I thought: it is not time.

I thought: he trusted me.

I put my hand in the pocket of my cardigan, where I had started keeping my house key separate from the ring, on its own little loop, since December, and I felt the shape of it, and I went to the freezer to get out something for dinner, because Doug was coming at six, and I had not yet decided about him, but I had decided about a great many other things, and that, for a Tuesday in March in the seventy-fourth year of my life, was enough.