The Farm They Nearly Signed Away

The Christmas card came back marked “no longer at this address,” and that was the first thread I pulled.

I had sent Earl Merrick a card every December for eleven years, ever since his son and I signed the last of our divorce papers at the county courthouse and shook hands in the parking lot like two people agreeing to stop bleeding on each other. Dale and I did not work out. That is an old, quiet story and I will not spend your time on it. But Earl was a different matter. Earl walked me down the aisle when my own father was three years in the ground. Earl taught me to back a trailer down the lane without jackknifing it. Earl kept peppermints in his shirt pocket and slid me one across the church pew when the sermon ran long, the way you would pass a note to a friend. When Dale and I split, Earl drove forty minutes to my new apartment with a casserole his late wife Nadine used to make, set it on my counter, and said, “You are not fired from this family, Diane. You just changed departments.”

So I kept sending the cards. And every year Earl sent one back, in that careful looping hand, always the same closing line: “The apple trees are holding on. So am I.”

This year the card came back to me instead. No longer at this address.

Earl had lived on that farm for fifty-one years. There was only one way a man leaves an address he has held for fifty-one years, and it is not because he moved somewhere nicer.

The card came back

I called the farm and got a recording saying the number was disconnected. I called Dale, my ex-husband, and it went to voicemail, which did not surprise me, because Dale had been screening my calls since roughly 2009. I called Earl’s daughter Sharon, who I had always found a little cold but never cruel, and Sharon picked up on the fourth ring with a voice like a door held open exactly two inches.

“Diane,” she said. “Well. It has been a while.”

“It has. I sent Dad a card and it came back. Is he all right? Is the farm all right?”

There was a pause, and in that pause I heard something I did not like. Not grief. Calculation. The sound a person makes when they are deciding how much of the truth is safe to give you.

“Dad’s at Prairie Rose now,” Sharon said. “The care center out on Route 9. It got to be too much for him out there alone. The stove, the bills, all of it. We had to make some hard decisions as a family.”

We. As a family. I noticed she said it the way you say a password.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“Back in the spring.”

It was October. Earl had been in a care facility for six months and nobody had thought to tell the woman who sent him a card every Christmas. I understood, standing there in my kitchen with a returned envelope in my hand, that I had not been left off a list by accident. I had been left off on purpose, because whoever was making the hard family decisions did not want anyone around Earl who might ask an inconvenient question.

“I’d like to visit him,” I said.

“I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” Sharon said. “He gets confused. New faces upset him.”

New faces. I had known Earl Merrick for twenty-three years. I had held his hand at Nadine’s funeral while he shook so hard the pew rattled. I was not a new face. I was a witness, and Sharon knew it.

“I’ll keep it short,” I said, and hung up before she could build another wall.