Where the everything went
I sold the corn ground to the Vandenberg boys, who had farmed it well and honestly for fifteen years and who nearly fell over when I offered it to them at a fair price with terms they could actually meet. I set up the trust so that the bulk of Tom’s accounts would fund two things after I am gone: scholarships for kids at the county high school who want to go on to the community college and do not have the money, the kind of kids Tom and I had been, and a fund at the Methodist church for families in the parish who fall on a hard patch, a furnace that dies in February, a medical bill, a stretch of no work. Quiet money, given the way Tom used to give it, without a name attached.
The house I sold. It was too big for one woman and it had too many rooms full of nobody, and I was done rattling around in it waiting for headlights.
The lake cabin I kept. That one I could not give up, because it was ours before it was ever theirs, and because I intend to use it. I put in a good furnace and I winterized it and I moved a few of my favorite things up there, Tom’s reading chair and the pecan bread pans and the pearls.
And then, in March, I did the thing the headline calls disappearing, though there was nothing dark about it. I took a small apartment in a town where none of my children would think to look, near a friend from my nursing school days who I had let drift and who welcomed me back like no time had passed. I did not tell my children where I was. Not out of cruelty. Because after thirty years of raising them and ten years of chasing them, I had finally decided that where I lived was mine to know, and that a person who wants to find me can start by calling to ask how I am, and not by wondering what is left.