The Store My Husband Thought Was His

The Cracks I Had Been Sanding Over

The thing about betrayal is that it is almost never the surprise people imagine. It is a surprise the way the roof caving in is a surprise, after you have been telling yourself for two winters that the stain on the ceiling was nothing.

For about six months before the farm show, Wade had been gone more than he was home. He worked as an outside sales rep for a regional equipment distributor, the kind of job that had always meant a night away here and there, a dealer meeting in Wichita, a long day driving fence-line to fence-line writing orders for balers and augers. I had never minded. I liked the quiet nights, and I liked that he came home full of stories.

Then the nights away stopped being here and there. They became every week. Then twice a week. A “regional push.” A “territory realignment.” A “new account that needs babysitting.” He always had a reason, and every reason sounded like the kind of thing a hardworking man says, so I nodded and I kept the porch light on.

There was a name that had started to bother me, though. Kayla. She had been hired on to handle Wade’s route paperwork and his accounts, a girl barely out of the community college over in Danby, and every time her name came up it came up a little too easy in his mouth. Kayla found a discrepancy. Kayla drove out to the Hutchins place with me. Kayla says the new invoice system is a mess. I was not a jealous woman by nature. I had never once looked at his phone. My own father raised me to believe that a marriage you have to police is already over, so why bother policing it.

But at the fall banquet, the one I did go to, I watched that girl orbit my husband all night. She laughed too hard. She found reasons to stand near him. She looked at him the way a dog looks at the person who holds the leash and the food both, like he was the whole weather system of her life. When I brought it up in the truck on the way home, careful, not accusing, just saying I noticed, Wade did the thing that I now understand he had practiced in a mirror.

He sighed. He kept his eyes on the road. And he said, “You’re reading things into it, Nora. That’s insecurity talking. It isn’t a good look on you.”

Insecurity. He handed me that word like it was a gift, and like a fool I took it and I wore it. For months I wore it. Every time the old feeling came up, I told myself it was my own smallness and I pushed it back down. That is the part I am least proud of. Not that I trusted him. That I stopped trusting myself.

What My Father Built And Never Told Me To Hide

To understand what happened at that farm show, you have to understand my father, Harlan Tilden, and you have to understand the store.

My dad opened Tilden Feed and Seed in 1971 on the corner of Main and Second in Ellery, Kansas, population a little under nine hundred and shrinking every census. It was a plain cinderblock building with a loading dock out back and a wooden counter he built himself out of oak salvaged from a torn-down granary. He sold feed, seed, fencing, fertilizer, work gloves, boots, dog food, and advice, and the advice was free and worth more than the rest. When a hailstorm flattened somebody’s wheat, my dad carried them on credit until the next crop. When the Vietnam boys came home and could not find their footing, he gave a few of them work on the dock. Half of that town got married, buried, and back on their feet with my father somewhere in the story.

He also did not trust charm. He used to say that a man who could talk you into anything could talk you out of everything, and he watched Wade Coburn with a flat, patient eye from the day I brought him home.