The Farm They Thought I Rented

The tenant she never met

Now here is the part that Diane, who thought she was the smartest woman at every table she sat at, never put together in two years.

Merritt Implement, the farm equipment dealership that Roy Merritt ran and that Diane bragged about at every opportunity, the green tractors lined up along the frontage and the parts counter and the service bays, the business that in Diane’s telling made the Merritts the leading family of Danby, that whole operation sat on a rented lot and, more to the point, its offices and its parts store and its showroom filled the ground floor of the big two story brick building on the corner of Main and Second.

The building my grandfather bought in 1961.

The building I had owned, free and clear, for four years.

The Merritts had leased that ground floor for going on twenty six years. Roy signed the first lease with my grandfather when I was a child. I remember Walt coming home and saying the Merritt boy had a good handshake and a bad habit of thinking he was doing you the favor. The rent went to the Hartwell account. When Walt died it kept coming, only now it came to me, because I was the Hartwell account, and every quarter Roy Merritt’s bookkeeper cut a check made out to Hartwell Properties, and every quarter I deposited it, and not one Merritt in that whole loud family ever once wondered who Hartwell was or whether she might turn up at Sunday dinner.

I had kept their rent low. That is the thing I want you to sit with for a minute. When their five year lease came up two years back, right around the time Dale started coming around, I had my grandfather’s lawyer, old Merl Pruitt, hold the rent exactly where it was, well under what that corner was worth, because Roy had been my grandfather’s tenant for a long time and because I did not believe in squeezing people, even people I did not much care for. I did that quietly, the way Walt did his kindnesses, and Roy Merritt banked the savings and told his Rotary table he was too shrewd to let a landlord push him around.

When Dale and I got engaged, I thought about telling them. I lay awake more than one night thinking about how to say it. And every time I got close, Walt’s handwriting came up in front of me. Let them show you who they are first. So I decided I would let the wedding pass, let the dust settle, and then, gently, over a pie, I would tell Diane and Roy that the woman their son married was the woman who had been carrying their business on a fair deal for four years, and we would all have a good laugh about the smallness of the world.

I never got to the pie.

They handed me a lease first.