Diane did not call again. Marcus called once on the second of November to ask if Raymond had explored selling the mineral rights. When Raymond said there were no mineral rights worth selling, Marcus said, “That’s a shame,” and the call ended. Kevin did not come back.
Tammy called Nora in early November, her voice careful and thin, asking if Nora had heard from her father-in-law recently. Nora told Tammy that she had, that she was visiting every Saturday. Tammy said Kevin wouldn’t talk about it, that he came home from the trailer visit and sat in the garage for two hours without starting any work, that she was worried.
But Nora came. Every Saturday without exception, her station wagon appeared on the gravel drive between nine and ten in the morning. She came with groceries packed in reusable bags from the Fareway in Cedar Falls. She came with Lily and Sam, who had started treating the trailer like an adventure. Sam called it Grandpa’s camping house. Lily asked why there was no TV.
Each visit followed a rhythm. Nora arrived, checked the pantry, put the groceries away. She walked through the trailer looking for things that needed fixing, a loose cabinet hinge, a dripping faucet, the window latch that did not close all the way. She brought tools in a canvas bag from Ben’s garage, and she fixed things quietly without fanfare, the way someone tends a garden, not for praise, because things needed tending.
On the third Saturday in November, Nora brought a casserole dish wrapped in foil and a set of curtains she had sewn during the week. The curtains were a dark blue cotton, simple, the kind you could close against the cold. She hung them on a tension rod over the trailer’s largest window while Raymond sat at the table and watched her work.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “I know.” “The curtains.” “The trailer gets cold at night. Curtains help.” She adjusted the fabric, stepped back, decided the hem was even. “Mom used to say that a house isn’t warm because of the furnace. It’s warm because someone cared enough to make it that way.”
Raymond looked at the blue curtains. They changed the room, not dramatically, not in any way a photograph would capture, but the trailer felt less temporary with them there, less abandoned. That evening, after she had cooked chicken and rice from Eileen’s recipe, the one with the cream of mushroom soup that all four children had grown up eating, Nora put the kids to bed in the fold-down area at the back of the trailer.
She tucked Lily into a sleeping bag and read Sam a story until his eyes closed. Then she came back to the front, poured two cups of coffee, and sat across from Raymond at the table. “You don’t have to explain anything, Dad,” she said. “I don’t need to know what happened with the money or the farm or the elevators. I just need to know you’re eating, that you’re not sitting here alone every night talking to Mom’s picture.”