My Three Kids Voted to Sell the Farm at Sunday Dinner, They Forgot Whose Name Was on the Deed

Part 4: Spring

I did not hear from Danny for four months.

That is not entirely true. He called on Christmas. He called on my birthday in February. Both calls were short and both were the kind of call you make because your wife has told you that you have to, and I could hear his wife Karen in the background on both of them, prompting. I was polite. I did not ask him when he was coming to visit. He did not offer.

Rachel came the weekend after that Sunday dinner. She drove up from Cincinnati on a Saturday morning and she did not bring her laptop and she did not bring her husband and she did not bring the twins. She brought a coffee cake from the bakery near her house, and she sat at my kitchen table, and she cried for about twenty minutes without saying anything.

Then she said, “I’m scared of you getting old, Mama.”

I said, “I know you are.”

She said, “I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to have a mother who gets old. Grandma died when I was six and Dad died fast and I don’t. I don’t know how this is supposed to go.”

I said, “Neither do I, sweetheart. We’ll figure it out.”

She came back the next weekend. And the one after that. By March she was coming every other Saturday, and by April she was helping me put in the garden, and one afternoon in late April she said, without looking at me, “I fired the realtor. In November. The day after.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “You know everything, don’t you.”

I said, “No. But I know you.”

Michael was the one who told me about Danny.

Michael and I had gotten in the habit of Wednesday dinners, which was new. He drove out from Toledo where he had, six years ago, quietly stopped drinking, a thing none of us had ever properly acknowledged because Danny had decided a long time ago what Michael was and had never bothered to update the file. Michael brought groceries and he cooked, badly but with enthusiasm, and we ate at the kitchen table and talked about nothing in particular.

One Wednesday in May, Michael said, “Danny asked me to lunch.”

I set down my fork.

“When.”

“Last week. In Columbus. He picked the place.”

“And.”

Michael took his time. He was chewing. Michael has always been the child who takes his time.

“He asked me how you were.”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it. He asked how you were, I said you were good, he said he was glad, and then we talked about the Guardians for forty minutes and he paid for lunch and we left.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“Did he say anything about.”

“No.”

“Nothing at all.”

“Nothing at all. Mom, he’s not going to. Not the way you want him to. That’s not who he is.”

I thought about that for a while.

I thought about it while I did the dishes, and I thought about it that night in bed, and I thought about it the next morning walking out to the pasture where Ray was buried under the big oak. I sat on the bench Michael had built me two summers ago, the one I had not told Danny or Rachel about because I had not wanted them to know that Michael had been building me things.

I sat there and I thought about my son Danny.

Danny is not going to write me a letter. Danny is not going to sit down at my kitchen table and cry and say the words. Danny is going to ask his brother how I am, and pay for lunch, and drive back to Columbus, and that is the shape of the apology I am going to get, and it is going to have to be enough.

Ray, if he had been there, would have said, that boy is more like my father than either of us wanted to admit. And I would have said, I know. And Ray would have said, he’ll come around in his own way, Ellie. And I would have said, I know that too.

I sat on the bench a long time.

In June, Danny called and asked if he could bring the kids up for the Fourth of July.

I said yes.

He said, “Karen said I should ask if there’s anything we can bring.”

I said, “Just yourselves.”

He said, “Mom.”

I said, “Yeah.”

There was a long pause. I could hear his breathing on the other end of the line. I could hear a car going by wherever he was. I could hear him decide, three or four times, to say something, and each time decide not to.

Finally he said, “The roof.”

I said, “What about it.”

He said, “I’d like to pay for it. If you’ll let me. Not, not as anything. Not as anything to do with. I’d just like to pay for it.”

I said, “Okay, Danny.”

He said, “Okay?”

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “Alright then. Alright. Fourth of July. We’ll be there.”

He hung up.

I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand for a while. Then I put it back in the cradle, and I went outside and walked out to the barn.

The roof was bad. Michael and I had both been looking at it for months. Rachel had noticed it in April and had not said anything, which was, in its own way, a kind of grace.

I stood in the yard and looked up at it. The shingles were curling on the south side, and there was a soft spot near the cupola that was going to be trouble by winter. Eighteen thousand dollars, Rachel had said. It was probably twenty now.

The barn had been standing on that spot since 1911. Ray’s grandfather had built it. Ray had reroofed it once, in 1988, and I had held the ladder. I could remember, standing there in the June sun, exactly what his back had looked like from below, the way his shirt had stuck to him between the shoulder blades, the way he had cussed at a bent nail and then apologized to me for cussing, even though I had heard him cuss a thousand times.

Ray, I said, not out loud. Ray, our oldest boy wants to pay for the roof.

I could almost hear him laugh. Not a mean laugh. The other kind. The kind Ray had when one of the kids finally, finally figured something out, six years after he had tried to tell them.

About time, he would have said.

I stood in the yard until the sun started to drop behind the tree line. Then I went inside and I got out the good plates, the ones with the little blue flowers, and I set them on the sideboard where I could see them.

Four of them. For the Fourth of July.

I would need to get more out later, for Danny’s kids, but for tonight, just the four. Me and my three children.

I had not set that many places at my own table in a long time.

I thought I might set them out early. Just to look at them. Just to see.