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Chapter Seven
Sunday, April 7
Heavenly’s handsshook as she put the nondescript beige rental in park beside the for sale sign in the yard and stared at the early-morning light glinting off the farm she’d called home for the first fifteen years of her life.
Even in the soft blush of a new day, it looked like something out of a horror film. It looked nothing like the home of her memories.
Weeds had overtaken the front of the house, growing in a wild profusion with the budding hues of spring. Same with the walkway her father had once bricked, which led to the house and the barn, still standing side by side.
Both buildings were run-down now, windows broken and looking derelict. She gaped at the barn’s sagging roof, probably buckling under the weight of winter snows past. Half the shingles had been blown away by time and gusts. The stark white exterior she remembered was a dingy, peeling gray.
Despite being brick, the house hadn’t fared much better. It now choked on the ivy her mother had insisted on planting one summer—against her father’s wishes.
Numbly, she stepped from the car and shut the door. Her stomach whirled. Not like it had on the plane ride to Wisconsin. That had been thrilling. Now she just felt sick. How many years had the property been vacant?
Still trying to wrap her head around the disrepair, she circled the back of the vehicle and pulled her father’s urn from the front seat, clutching it like a lifeline as she kicked her way through the overgrown vegetation, toward the front door.
Swallowing tightly, she tried turning the rusted handle. It was so loose it nearly came off in her hand. She pushed the door from the threshold. It squeaked in protest as she opened the portal to her past.
Musty air rushed her, filling her nose with a vaguely unpleasant smell. Dust, cobwebs, and trash littered the family room. Something besides the scattered beer bottles and discarded food wrappers had gouged scars into the decades-old hardwood floors. Now those knotty red pine boards were buckled with water damage. The walls were covered in multicolored, spray-painted graffiti. Soot caked the big brick fireplace, which now leaned off-kilter, as if it sagged under decades and gravity.
Heavenly pressed a distressed hand to her chest as she wandered into the kitchen. It hadn’t fared much better. The shelves her father had once hung to display her mom’s kettle collection staggered and sloped. The white beadboard walls and ceilings were bashed and broken, paint bubbling. The striking shade of blue they’d painted the cabinets had long since chipped and faded to gray.
She tried to make sense of the place, but this was no longer the home where she’d celebrated Christmases or where her father had met her with a hug when she’d bounded off the school bus every day. It seeped with suffering. The past was a scar here, its flesh first gouged that awful day her mother had blithely announced that fifteen-year-old Heavenly would be the sole caregiver for her ailing father because Lisa hadn’t really meant the “in sickness and in health” part of her vows. The wound had deepened when they’d been forced to sell for a pittance to some out-of-towners who clearly hadn’t stuck it out in the dairy farm business through multiple bitter Wisconsin winters. It had cut clear to the bone as the farm sat empty, idle, untended. Unloved.
Heavenly turned in a semicircle. On the far side of the kitchen, the oven door yawned open, the dials along the front slitted like the judgmental eyes of a house telling her to get out because she no longer belonged here.
With a cry, she ran for the back door. She didn’t even want to see the rest of the house.
She dashed past the little tick marks with the accompanying dates on the frame of the back door and sprinted behind the house. She was almost grateful for the stiff wind that grabbed her hair and tugged at her sweater. It might be chilly, but at least she no longer suffocated on the pervasive dust and mold swirling with neglect. She could breathe again.
Clutching the brushed silver urn a little tighter, she headed purposefully toward the big tree still standing proudly over the prairie. Their tree. That’s what her father had called it. She remembered playing on the rope swing that had once hung there while her father had tended the cows, when he’d occasionally given her a gentle push and a playful wink. Even it had changed with time, the bark peeling, the barren branches seemingly caught in endless winter.
She couldn’t stay another five minutes. How was she going to leave her father here for eternity?
“Buck up,” she muttered to herself. “And do it.”
For him.
After all, his request had been straightforward. She’d done the hard part by traveling across the country, leaving behind the men who cared so much about her—with no assurances of a future—to come here and fulfill this solemn duty. All she had to do now was turn the lid, tip the urn over, and reunite her father with his beloved Wisconsin home.
But Heavenly hesitated. Leave Daddy here, among the emptiness and neglect? Let him stew forever on what had become of the farm they had both once loved?
Everything inside her screamed no.
Maybe she was being silly and sentimental. Maybe he was up in heaven and could see past the run-down hovel to the tradition and love the farm had once held. Maybe leaving him here would help bring the land full circle so it could heal.
She had to look at it that way or she’d never be at peace with what she had to do.
But when she fitted her fingers around the urn’s lid, she froze. Everything inside her shrieked a resounding stop!
Heavenly clutched the silver vessel tighter, tears springing to her eyes.
If she left her father here, how would she ever visit him? He would be spread with the wind, scattered in all directions. Where would she talk to him?
She was making excuses now, but since his death, she’d been trying to close her eyes and reach him. She’d hoped he would come to her in her dreams or somehow give her a sign.
Nothing. She felt every bit as abandoned as this house, and if she left her father’s ashes behind, it would only seem as if she’d written both the farm and the man off to the past and turned her back on them for good.
