I carried the deed up the narrow stairs of Ostermeyer Hardware, spread it on my card table beside the hot plate, and put my finger on the third name, the one I knew better than my own face. Hazel M. Kincaid. My mother. She had signed in the same round, careful hand she used for the church treasurer reports, and the date beside it was the fourteenth of March, 1996. I had known her to say only one thing about that house, in all her years. Your half is waiting, Earlene.
Krista and Jody stood by the claw foot tub like two children sent to the principal. Jody had taken off his cap and was turning it around and around in his hands. “That is the house on Ash Street,” Krista said, quietly. “Book 214. The lawyer found it yesterday in the old index, under her name. He says it was filed under Kincaid, not under Hoskins, and nobody looked.” I nodded slowly. The second name, struck through in blue ink and initialed, was Lorraine, the first wife of Merle, who had died a month before the closing.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. In my mind I could see it all, the way you can see a field after a storm. In 1996 my mother had been a widow of sixty five, working in the kitchen at the nursing home, with eleven thousand dollars in a coffee can. Merle had been a widower with two grown children and a good eye for a house. They knew each other from the church. They had bought the place on Ash Street together, half and half, because neither could manage it alone.
“I did not know until after I married him,” I said. “Hazel lived in the back bedroom for her last eleven years, and Merle fixed her porch rail and her gutters and never took a dime in rent. I thought they were just friends. When she passed, her will left her half to me. I took it to the courthouse myself in 2008 and had it recorded.” I looked at Krista. “That recording is in the same book, three pages on. Your lawyer is not very thorough.”
What is built on honest friendship is seldom listed in the index, but it stands up in court all the same.
Jody sat down on the folding chair as if his legs had given way. He is a big man, forty four years old, with hands like shovels. “Earlene,” he said, “we thought it was all the property of Dad. He never told us he had a partner on that deed. We never read it.” He rubbed his face. “I told Krista you had no claim. I told her it was fine to give you thirty days. I had a loan on the truck and a realtor friend who said it would sell fast.” His voice shook. “I am ashamed.”
“So am I,” Krista said, and I turned in surprise. She had never in nineteen years said so much to me in a single breath. Her eyes were red. “I wrote that notice because Jody was upset and I was angry. I have been angry since the funeral. Dad married you and moved on, and I felt like I had lost him twice.” She took a breath. “And I took it out on the one person who sat with him every night for nineteen years.” I got up from the bed and crossed the room and took her hands.
I told her that nobody replaces a father. I told her the house on Ash Street had never been mine alone or Merle alone, but a promise between two people who had no one else, and that the only thing I wanted was for it to be a home again. Then I asked a question I had been saving. Would she and Jody consider keeping their half, as co owners, and letting me stay in my half, in the front bedroom, the one with the window? They looked at each other. Jody said yes before she did.
We drew it up at the kitchen table of Ambrose, with a lawyer from Hays who was thorough. The house was to be held in three equal parts, the half of Merle divided between his children and my half in my name, and no part to be sold without all three. I moved back on the first of October. Ambrose cried a little at the door, and I promised to keep his books on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he said the claw foot tub was mine whenever I wanted it, and that was the kindest thing he could have said.
The first Sunday in the house, Krista came for supper with her two children, and she stood in the doorway with a casserole. She looked at the church calendar on the refrigerator, in the square where she had taped the notice, and said nothing. Then she walked to the kitchen drawer, opened it, and took out the carpenter pencil of her father, sharpened flat with his pocketknife. She turned it over in her fingers. “I think this belongs to the house,” she said. I told her it did, and so did she.
We made peace slowly, the way a pie sets. Jody fixed the back porch. Krista came on Wednesdays and learned to balance the household books, in pencil, on a legal pad, and found she liked it. She has a head for figures, like her father. Her son sits on a stool in the kitchen with his homework, and he calls me Earlene, as she does, but with a little extra something at the end that I choose to call affection.
On the first of November, I took the old rabbit foot key ring from the hook by the back door. I put a new key on it, a bright brass one, and gave it to Krista in front of the whole family. “Come in any time,” I said. “You never need to knock.” She laughed, and then she cried, and then she hugged me hard enough to knock my glasses crooked. Merle would have enjoyed that. I like to think he was in the recliner, with his eyes closed, listening.