Gordon set his coffee cup down on my kitchen table. He folded his hands the way he does before grace.
And he told me the house I was sitting in belonged to him.
“That house sits on my ground, Kayla,” he said. “Anything on my ground is mine. That’s just how it works out here. Ask anybody.”
He didn’t raise his voice.
Gordon Rasmussen never raises his voice. He said it the way a man reads the price of diesel off the sign at the Cenex. Flat. Certain. A little bored.
It was a Tuesday night in April. The kids were in bed. My husband Jake was in the shower after a long day at the implement shop. And I’d made a fresh pot of coffee because Gordon had stopped by “to talk about the lease.”
There was no lease.
There had never been a lease.
There was a check for five hundred dollars that Jake wrote on the first of every month and walked across the yard to his father’s house.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “We built this house. We paid for every stick of it. You know that. You watched us do it.”
“I know you did,” Gordon said. “And I’m glad you did. But you built it on my ground. You put a house on another man’s land, it goes with the land. That’s the law.”
I looked over at the refrigerator.
My son Cole’s spelling test was stuck up there with a gold star on it. My daughter Hailey’s drawing of a horse from fourth grade was still up there too, curling at the corner.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Because I’m getting older. Because I’ve been to see Bill Hanson about my will. And because I think you two ought to know where things stand.”
Then he picked his cup back up and finished his coffee. Like we’d been talking about the weather.
My name is Kayla Rasmussen. I’m thirty-nine years old. I’m a paraprofessional at the elementary school in Hemingford, Nebraska.
And until that Tuesday night, I thought I lived in my own house.
Eleven years earlier, it had been Gordon’s idea.
Jake and I were renting a drafty little place in Alliance from a landlord who never fixed anything. Hailey was a baby. I was working as a para at the elementary school. Jake was turning wrenches at the implement dealer.
Gordon came by one Sunday afternoon. He sat on our sagging couch and looked up at the brown water stain on the ceiling for a long minute.
“I’ve got that corner by the road,” he said. “The one past the shelterbelt. Where the old granary used to be. Two acres, more or less. Build there. Save yourselves buying a lot.”
Jake’s mother, Ruthann, was sitting next to him on the couch. She squeezed his arm. And she smiled at me.
I remember thinking it was the kindest thing anybody in Jake’s family had ever said to us.
We didn’t have much.
What we had, we put into that house.
It was a plain one-story. Twelve hundred square feet. Three bedrooms. One bath. Jake drew it out on graph paper at the kitchen table in our rental.
We built it on a concrete block crawl space, because a basement was more than we could afford.
My dad, Lowell Olson, came over every Saturday for two whole summers with his own tools in the back of his Ford. He and Jake framed every single wall. I hung drywall with a borrowed lift until my shoulders burned so bad I couldn’t lift my arms to wash my hair.
We paid for it with everything we’d saved. Plus a small loan from the credit union against Jake’s tools and his truck. Plus every overtime hour Jake could get.
No bank would write a mortgage on a house sitting on somebody else’s land. We found that out early.
We moved in the October Hailey turned two.
She toddled across the bare plywood floor in her socks and laughed at the echo.
Ruthann cried in the doorway. And she brought us a cherry pie.
The first of the next month, Gordon came by at suppertime.
“I’ll need five hundred a month for the ground,” he said. “My dad charged me for mine when I started out. It’s how a man learns what things cost.”
Jake looked at me.
I looked at Jake.
We’d just spent every dollar we had in this world.
But it was his father. And it was his father’s land. And Jake was raised not to argue.
“Okay, Dad,” Jake said.
He wrote the first check that night at the kitchen table.
I kept the carbon copy. In a shoebox. On the closet shelf.
I don’t know why I kept it. I guess part of me already knew I’d want to count them someday.
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