That first winter, Dale and I wore stocking caps to bed.

The old oil furnace ran day and night, and the upstairs never got warmer than fifty-five degrees. So we closed off the three upstairs bedrooms and lived downstairs like a couple of old bachelors.

In 2009, an electrician from Sheldon came out to look at a light switch that buzzed. He went down to the basement. He looked up at the ceiling. And he came back up the stairs white as flour.

“You’ve got knob-and-tube wiring down there,” he said. “And somebody spliced into it with lamp cord. I wouldn’t sleep in this house tonight.”

Rewiring the whole house cost us eleven thousand, five hundred dollars. We took out a home equity loan and paid it off over five years.

In 2011, hail took the roof. Insurance covered part of it. We paid fourteen thousand dollars out of our own pocket for a new roof, decking and all. The old boards underneath were rotten clear through.

In 2014, the oil furnace died for good. On the coldest night of January. We put in a propane furnace and new ductwork for seven thousand, eight hundred dollars. Dale says it’s the best money he ever spent. He says it every single winter.

Then came the well pump. The septic. The windows on the north side. The front porch floor. The water heater. Twice.

I’m a mail carrier. I keep track of things. That’s the whole job.

I kept every receipt from that house in a spiral notebook in the hutch drawer. And every January, when the propane bill came, I added it all up.

By that Tuesday night in March, it came to sixty thousand, three hundred and forty dollars.

That’s not counting the work Dale and I did ourselves. Every wall I patched. Every window I reglazed. Every Saturday Dale spent under that porch with a jack.

So I sat there with my coffee going cold, and I looked at my mother.

She’s seventy-four. She has a bad hip and a good heart. And she’s been rescuing my little brother since the day he was born.

When Jeff broke his arm on the trampoline, Mom drove him to the hospital in Sioux City in her nightgown. When he wrecked his first car, Dad paid the deductible. When he and Amber couldn’t make rent, Mom slipped him checks I wasn’t supposed to know about.

None of that ever made me angry. Jeff was the baby. That’s what you do with the baby.

But this was my house.

I could feel Dale’s eyes on me from down the table.

I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it too. Twenty years of propane bills and stocking caps. Twenty years of Saturdays.

Then, under the table, Dale’s hand found my knee. He squeezed it once.

That was Dale telling me: it’s your family. It’s your call. And whatever you say, I’m standing right behind you.

I looked at Mom.

I looked at Dad, who still hadn’t looked up from his cap.

“Thank you,” I said.

Mom blinked.

“Thank you for asking me to my face,” I said. “You could’ve sent Jeff out here to ask me. You could’ve written it in a letter. But you came yourselves. You sat at my table. And you said it out loud. That took something. I know it did.”

Mom’s mouth opened a little. Then it closed again.

She’d come out here ready for a fight. Or for a yes. She had her whole speech ready for either one.

She didn’t have anything ready for thank you.

“I’ll give you an answer on Saturday,” I said.

Dad finally looked up. His eyes were wet.

“Tammy,” he said.

And then he didn’t say anything else.

They left a few minutes later. I stood at the kitchen window and watched their taillights go down the gravel toward the blacktop until the cedars swallowed them up.

Dale didn’t say a single word until we were in bed.

The wind was coming hard out of the northwest, the way it does in March, rattling the storm windows we hadn’t taken down yet. Dale lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“I don’t know yet.”

“It’s your folks,” he said. “And it’s your brother. I’m not going to tell you what to do about your own family.”

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.

“But it’s my house too, Tam. I put my back into it. I want you to know I’m not giving it up quiet.”

“I know.”

“Whatever you decide, I’m with you. I just want you to know where I stand.”

That’s the most Dale has said in one breath since he proposed.