The Farm They Thought I Rented

Diane’s mouth opened and nothing came out of it. In two years it was the only time I ever saw her without a sentence.

Then I turned to Dale.

My husband of ten days was standing at the edge of the clump, a little apart from his mother, and his face had gone through everything a face can go through and landed somewhere I had never seen on him, which was young. He looked about twelve years old standing in my yard.

“Nora,” he said. “I didn’t know. I swear to you I didn’t know any of this.”

“I believe you,” I said. And I did. That was the trouble. “You didn’t know, Dale, because you never asked me one real question either. You just took your mother’s word for who I was, and five days after you married me you told me to swallow my pride and pay her rent. You didn’t need to know I owned this. You should have stood up for me when you thought I owned nothing. That was the whole test, and you didn’t even see there was a test.”

He did not have anything to say to that. There was nothing to say to it. It was just true, and we both stood there in the wind knowing it was true.

November

They left the way you would think. Quiet. The Rotary wives could not get in the van fast enough. Diane’s sisters loaded her in like she had taken ill. Roy stood up off the hay bale, and he was the only one who came over to me before he left, and he put out his hand, the good handshake my grandfather had noticed thirty years before, and he said, “Your grandfather was a better man than me, Nora, and I knew it back then, and I let my wife forget it. That’s on me.” Which was more than I expected, and I shook his hand, because a man who can say that has one true thing left in him.

The lease came up the first of November, the way Merl Pruitt said it would.

I renewed it. I want you to know that I renewed the dealership’s lease, because the dealership is forty jobs in a town that does not have forty jobs to spare, and the men in those service bays never charged me rent for anything and never told me to be grateful. I renewed it at fair market rent, in writing, through Merl, the same terms I would give anyone, no favor and no punishment, and I signed it Nora Hartwell, and I had Merl deliver it to Roy with a short note in my hand that said only: A fair deal, same as my grandfather gave your father. That is how we do it. Handle your family.

Roy handled his family. I heard from Carol, who hears everything, that there was a reckoning in that house that went on for a week, and that Diane did not show her face at church for a month, and that when she did she sat in the back.

I did not go after Diane. I did not have to. She had spent thirty years building a throne out of a name that turned out to be renting its own floor from the girl she tried to bill four hundred dollars, and there is no punishment I could hand down that would land harder than her having to live inside that fact every first of the month when the rent check goes out to Hartwell Properties. She writes that check now knowing exactly whose name is on it. That is enough. That is more than enough.