“Every week,” Dad said. “Every Friday, until I found work again in May. A box on the porch. Never saw who left it. Never found out. Marta always thought it was the Swensons. That was your lot, there, Brent. Where your house is. The Swensons lived there for forty years. Little white farmhouse.”
Brent turned and looked at his gray house.
“I don’t know if it was them,” Dad said. “Never asked. Old man Swenson wouldn’t have told me anyway. Stubborn as a mule. But Marta believed it was. And she made me promise. That spring, when I got the job at the school bus garage, she sat me down at the kitchen table and made me promise. ‘Arne,’ she said. ‘We are going to pass it on. As long as we live. We are never going to let anybody on this road open their cupboards and find nothing.’”
