262.🪑 THE TABLE MY SON BUILT FOR MY OLD AGE

Chapter 06 - The House on Larch Street

The real estate agent was a woman named Susan Mercer. She remembered my father as the man who built the walnut bookcase in her first office twenty years ago, and she sounded genuinely distressed when I called.

“I haven't listed anything,” she assured me. “Paul asked for an estimate and a timeline. I told him I needed Arthur's instructions before I'd discuss a sale.”

“Did he say Dad had agreed?”

“He said the family had agreed.”

I closed my eyes. The family. Such a convenient word for decisions nobody had made together.

Susan told me she'd called Claire because Claire was the maintenance contact she'd dealt with on an earlier appraisal. Three years before, Claire had helped Dad investigate replacing the bungalow's roof. She'd arranged the inspection, paid the contractor's fee, and never mentioned any of it to me.

When I phoned Claire, she said, “It didn't seem worth a discussion. Dad wanted to keep his house, so I helped him keep it.”

“And what did it cost you?”

“Money I could spare then. Time I didn't always have.”

“You could've told me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I could've.”

I was beginning to notice that whenever I wanted to accuse Claire of hiding things, she admitted it plainly. Her refusal to defend herself left me alone with what I hadn't asked.

On Saturday, I took Daniel to see Dad at Martha Green's house. Martha lived in a small brick duplex behind the Methodist church. Her front garden was full of chrysanthemums bent low by frost. She wore men's work boots and a pearl necklace over a sweatshirt, a combination my mother would have admired.

“Arthur's on the porch,” she said. “There's cocoa if you want it.”

Dad sat in a rocker with a blanket over his knees, reading the sports page. He stood when Daniel appeared, and the boy ran into his arms. For a moment I saw my father as Daniel saw him: tall enough to reach the top shelf, patient enough to find the square root of a mistake, and willing to spend a whole afternoon turning leftover wood into something useful.

“I brought your tape measure,” Daniel announced.

“Good man. I thought it had gone with the socks.”

Daniel climbed into the chair beside him. They talked about screws and football while Martha brought cocoa on a tray. She handed Dad an ordinary ceramic mug with two handles and a rubber grip beneath it. He took it easily.

At home, the bowl had seemed like an answer. Here, I watched Dad steady the mug by resting one handle on the chair arm. Somebody had found a way to preserve the ordinary pleasure of drinking from a cup he liked. I hadn’t asked what he liked for months.

I felt ashamed of the blue plastic bowl all over again. I hadn't looked for a better solution after buying it. I had looked for a way to stop worrying.

When Daniel went inside to inspect Martha's ancient dog, Dad motioned for me to sit.

“Susan says Paul asked about selling the house,” I told him.

“I know. She called me herself.”

“Are you angry?”

“I was angry. Now I'm mostly tired of hearing about plans for my life that I'm supposed to be grateful for.”

He folded the newspaper. “I might sell the bungalow. I've been thinking about it for years. But I want time to choose a buyer. I want to decide which things to keep. I've got your mother's sewing machine in the back room and forty years of photographs in the closet.”

“I'll help you sort them.”

“You will if you want to. You don't owe me a Saturday because you're sorry.”

I watched his hands rest on the paper. They were large, square hands, marked with small pale scars from decades of carpentry. The tremor had made them unreliable for certain things, but they were still his. He had never asked me to hold them still on his behalf.

“I do owe you an apology,” I said. “A proper one.”

He nodded, waiting.

“I made you eat alone because I was afraid something else would go wrong and I'd have to manage it. It was convenient for me. I told myself it was safer for you.”

He rubbed a thumb against the chair arm. “I knew you were tired, Meg. I was trying not to make it worse.”

“You shouldn't have needed to make yourself smaller.”

“No.” He looked toward the garden. “But I'm not innocent in all this either. I stopped asking after a while. I was waiting for you to notice.”

That was the first time either of us had described what happened without making the other person solely responsible. It was a small piece of ground. I was grateful we could stand on it together.

When Daniel came back outside, Dad asked for a few minutes with him alone. I went into the kitchen, where Martha was drying dishes. She handed me a towel without asking whether I wanted one. We worked side by side until I was able to look out the window without feeling caught spying.

“Arthur's been very quiet at night,” she said. “He misses you.”

“Then why won't he come home?”

“Missing someone isn't the same as feeling safe with them.”

I turned another mug in the towel. “He wasn't in danger.”

Martha gave me a long look. “You don't have to be in danger to feel unwelcome, dear.”

At the car, Daniel waved until Dad disappeared into the house. Then he asked whether Grandpa had seen the second thing he'd made.

“What second thing?”

Daniel looked startled. “Nothing. It's not finished.”

I didn't press him. I had begun to learn that children sometimes deserved privacy too.

On Sunday afternoon Claire met me at the bungalow. We were going through the back room, deciding which furniture Dad wanted moved to storage while the roof was inspected. She lifted an old ironing board from behind the wardrobe and uncovered a shallow cedar chest.

Inside were my mother's aprons, her wedding shoes, two hymnbooks, and a shoebox filled with receipts. Claire sat down on the edge of the bed before opening the box. Something in her face changed.

“That's the one,” she said.

“The one what?”

“The box I couldn't find after Mom died.”

She showed me a stack of checks drawn from her old account, each made out to the home-care service that had looked after Mom. Every check bore Claire's signature. The dates covered the last eight months of our mother's life, the months I had spent believing I was alone in managing everything.