MY STEPFATHER BROKE DOWN MY DOOR AT 2 A.M. — UNTIL ONE TAP UNDER MY KITCHEN TABLE TURNED HIS RAGE INTO TERROR
Chapter 26
There was a conversation about the house, and it was less interesting than people expect.
The property was worth money. Splitting it would have been practical and nobody would have objected. I had run the numbers with Paul twice. He had said, in his flat paperwork voice, “You could sell it tomorrow and never think about it again.”
I asked my mother what she wanted to do, in the kitchen of the house, on a Sunday in January with the heat running and the hydrangeas cut back to sticks outside the window.
She said, “What do we want to do.”
And I said, “Yes, that’s what I asked.”
We did not decide that day. We decided over about four months and a lot of ordinary conversation, which is how real decisions actually get made in a family that has stopped making them in silence.
What we decided was this.
We kept it. Not as a memorial — my father had specifically written that it should not be a memorial, and I have come to believe that the man understood families better than he understood anything else. We kept it as a room with no old argument in it.
The downstairs gets rented starting next spring, to a couple with a dog, on a lease that my mother read three times. The rent goes into a separate account for maintenance, and Paul, who cannot help himself, keeps the books.
The upstairs stays open.
Not as a museum and not as a shrine. There is a bed in the blue room and a desk with a notebook on it and a shelf with a small blue airplane on it, and the wallpaper is going to be removed this summer over Margaret’s theatrical objections. Anyone in the family who needs somewhere to land can land there. It costs them nothing and it does not require an explanation and there is a key under the third flowerpot from the steps, which everyone in this story knows and which Gordon Rusk does not.
I have used it twice. Once in April, after a long week, when I drove down on a Friday night and slept eleven hours and drove back on Sunday without talking to anybody. Once in September, when Margaret had her knee replaced and needed somebody to get the mail.
My mother has used it once, in a way she has never explained to me, and I have not asked, because I am trying not to be a person who asks on behalf of other people’s timing.
She has stopped deciding things in silence. Not perfectly. There was a Sunday in March when she forgot, and I called her on it in about nine words, and she said, “You’re right, I’m sorry,” and that was the whole conversation. Twenty years ago that would have been a two-month silence. It is now a two-sentence thing, and it happens less often than it used to.