“…my son Tommy,” I said into the telephone, “and he has owned it for forty years.” I could hear my brother breathing on the other end. It was the first time in decades that I had heard his voice, and it had gone gravelly and deep, like our father. “Margaret,” he said, “I am coming up. Do not let your son sign anything. And do not tell your granddaughter what I said. Not yet.” I sat in my kitchen with my cold tea, with the drawing propped against the sugar bowl. A large white house, a red barn, a pond like a coin. I had spent forty years trying to forget that picture.
He arrived the next day, in a dusty pickup truck, a lean old man with a white mustache and my own gray eyes. We stood in the driveway and looked at each other. We were seventy two and sixty eight. We had last spoken at our mother service, in a church basement, when I had called him a coward in front of the family. I had blamed him for what happened to the farm. He had been sixteen when the court took it, and I had been twenty eight, and I had said he should have fought harder. “Margaret,” Tommy said. “Can I come in?” I stood aside. He walked past me into the kitchen and took off his hat, and we both began to cry.
He laid it out for me over coffee, as carefully as he used to lay out a hand of cards. In 1984 our father, Joseph Dunne, had been sued by the bank and a neighbor for a sum he could not pay. The judge had ordered the farm sold. But Daddy, a stubborn, proud man, would not let it go to strangers. He had gone to a lawyer in town and arranged a quiet sale to his youngest son. Tommy had been sixteen, a minor, so the house went into a trust. “It was never really lost,” Tommy said. “It was only hidden. Dad made me promise never to tell you, because you would have fought it, and you would have lost, and it would have destroyed you.”
A drawing of a white house and red barn, a brother silent for forty years, and a house that was never really lost.
I sat very still. Outside, a mourning dove was calling from the clothesline. I had been so angry for forty years, so convinced that my brother had abandoned us. I thought of the way I had held my mother hand at the service and told her I would never forgive the man who sold it. And all along my father, the man I had loved most in the world, had been quietly protecting me from the thing I would have done. “Tommy,” I whispered. “I called you a coward.” He smiled. “I was one,” he said. “I kept the secret, and I let you hate me. It was easier than lying to you.”
I asked how my son knew. He explained that Michael, my boy, had found the address in my mother old papers a year ago, while clearing out the attic. He had called the county. He had found Tommy, who was seventy two, tired and ready to retire, and Tommy had made him an offer. “I told him the house should go back to the family,” Tommy said, “but only to someone who would love it. He said he would think about it. He talked to his wife, and they decided to surprise you.” He lowered his voice. “I told him not to. I told him you would be furious. But he insisted. He said, Uncle Tom, my mother has never stopped talking about that pond.”
The tears came again. I could not stop them. It was too much, all at once, like cold water on a numb foot. I remembered the pond in July, the water lilies, the smell of hay. I remembered my father carrying me on his shoulders to the barn. Tommy reached across the table and took my hand, and we sat there, two old people at a Formica table, holding on, while the clock ticked. At last I said, “Do you think I can see it?” He nodded. “That is why I am here,” he said. “The truck is outside. It is four hours, Margaret. If we leave now, we will be there by dark.”
We drove with the windows down. The countryside rolled out ahead of us, green and gold, and we talked the whole way, about our father, our mother, the cows we used to name after movie stars. By the time the sun sank behind the barn, I felt twenty years old. The house stood just as I remembered it, white as a sheet on the line, with the porch swing, the lilac, the long gravel drive. A small girl in a yellow dress was running across the yard. Behind her, Michael and his wife stepped onto the porch, hand in hand, looking anxious and hopeful and ten years younger than they had that morning.
I did not say a word. I walked up the drive, slowly, with Tommy beside me, and my granddaughter ran straight into my arms. “Grandma!” she cried. “Do you like it? Do you like your surprise?” I picked her up, though my back protested, and I held her close against my shoulder, and I looked past her at the pond. The water lilies were in bloom. I closed my eyes, and for a moment I was nine years old again, running down the lane with my sandals in my hand. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I like it very much.”
The papers were signed in the kitchen the next week. Michael bought the house from Tommy for a dollar, a fair price, according to the lawyer, given the trust. I moved into the downstairs bedroom, the one with the window that faces the barn. In the mornings we sit on the porch and drink coffee, and argue about the Yankees. Every evening he walks to the barn and checks on the swallows. I watch from the swing.
Last Sunday my granddaughter drew another picture. It showed the same white house, the red barn, the coin of the pond. But this time there were four figures on the porch: a girl, a woman, an old man in a hat, and another old woman in a rocking chair, holding a mug. Under it, in careful crayon capitals, she had printed one word. HOME. I have pinned it above the kitchen sink, where I can see it when I wash the dishes. Some mornings I stand there for a long time, with the water running and the sun on my hands, and I say it out loud, just to feel the shape of the word.