The Deed He Never Saw Coming
What Fifty Years Buys
To understand why I put four months of overtime and every spare dollar I had into a house eleven hours from my own front door, you have to understand what my parents actually got out of fifty years of marriage, because it was not much, and it was never supposed to be the point.
My father, Reggie, started at the grain elevator outside our hometown the summer he turned nineteen and retired from the same company thirty-eight years later, having moved up exactly twice in that whole span. He worked the floor during harvest weeks that ran sixteen hours a day, came home smelling like dust and diesel, and never once, in my entire childhood, missed a school program, a football game, or a Sunday at the little Methodist church two blocks off Main Street where he ushered for as long as I can remember.
My mother worked the cafeteria line at the elementary school for twenty-two years so her hours would match ours, then spent every summer canning tomatoes and green beans out of a garden the size of a double lot because groceries for four on a co-op paycheck did not stretch on their own. She clipped coupons out of the Sunday paper until I was thirty years old and finally convinced her she was allowed to stop. Their idea of a splurge was a potluck at the VFW hall on the Fourth of July, or a church bus trip to Branson every few years that they saved for like it was a trip to Rome.
They never once, in fifty years, took a vacation that wasn’t built around somebody else’s schedule or somebody else’s budget.
I am the oldest of two daughters, and somewhere along the way I became the one who noticed things like that. My sister Tonya noticed different things. She noticed when Mom and Dad had a little extra to spare, and she noticed exactly how much of it she could ask for before someone said no.
I don’t say that with any bitterness left in it anymore. It’s just the shape our family took, and I made my peace with my half of it a long time ago. I became the one who fixed things. Tonya became the one who needed them fixed. It worked, in its way, for almost forty years.
The Paycheck I Didn’t Spend
I have worked at the same Textron plant on the east side of Wichita for eleven years, running a production line that builds parts for small aircraft, and I have said yes to almost every overtime shift the schedule board has offered me since the week I got divorced. Some of that was about the money. A lot of it, if I’m honest, was about having somewhere to be that wasn’t an empty house.
Somewhere around year eight, that overtime stopped being about filling time and started being about a number in a savings account that I did not tell anyone I was watching. I ate lunch out of a cooler instead of the vending machines. I drove the same truck for nine years past the point my coworkers started teasing me about it. I did not buy a single thing for myself that I could not pay for in cash, and every bonus check went straight into an account with a name on it that only I knew: Mom and Dad, Anniversary.