The Farm She Thought She Owned
Who Darlene was, and who she thought we all were
To understand what I did that night, you have to understand what Darlene Foss was in our town, and what she believed she was, because the two were not the same thing, and the gap between them was the whole story.
We live in a flat stretch of farm country in the middle of the country, the kind of place where the tallest thing for twenty miles is the grain elevator by the tracks. Our town has one blinking light, a diner that has been the same diner since before I was born, a feed store, two churches that do not entirely approve of each other, and a Friday night football team that everybody in three townships drives to watch. It is not a fancy place. Nobody here is rich the way people are rich on television. But there is money that is quiet and old, and there is respect that gets handed down like a name, and Darlene had both, or believed she did.
The Foss farm sat four miles north of town on the good black dirt, five hundred and twenty acres with a white two story farmhouse that Darlene’s husband’s grandfather had built in 1911. It had a wraparound porch and a windmill that still turned and a long dining room that could seat twenty when the leaves were in the table. To the people around here, that house was not just a house. It was where the Foss family had always been. Darlene had married into it at twenty two, buried her husband Carl in it at fifty eight, and in the twenty years since she had turned herself into the last living monument of it. She ran the altar guild. She judged the pie tables at the county fair. She had a pew, an actual assigned pew, that no visitor was ever brave enough to sit in. When people in town said the Foss name, they said it a little softer, the way you say the name of the bank.
And Darlene loved being the Foss name. She loved it more than she loved almost anything, including, I came to understand, her own grandchildren, who were useful to her mainly as proof that the line went on.
I was never going to be a Foss to her. I was Rachel, a girl from the trailer court on the south edge of town, whose daddy fixed transmissions and whose mama cleaned rooms out at the interstate motel. I met Wade at the community college in the next county over, both of us the first in our families to go, and we fell in love over a shared calculus book and a shared understanding of what it was to be tired. Wade was gentle and steady and funny in a quiet way, and he had spent his whole life being told he was the heir to something, and being made to feel, every single day, that he was not quite worthy of it.