The Coffee Mill They Left Me

What happened to the money

You want to know what happened to them. I wanted to know too, for a long time, and I am not proud of how much.

Carol got the house, and the house needed a new roof and a new furnace and a new septic she had not counted on, and she did not want to live three hours from her hair appointments anyway, so she sold it. The man who bought it lowballed her because the west footing was heaved and the maple root had done its work, and by the time she paid the realtor and the repairs she cleared less than half of what she thought she was getting. She spent it. I do not know on what. Carol was always spending money on the next thing that would make her feel like enough, and it never did, because that is not a thing money buys.

Pete got the land, and Pete did what men like Pete do, which is he borrowed against it. He mortgaged the eighty acres to go in on a bigger operation with a man you should not go in with, and there was a bad year and then a worse one, and I heard, because you always hear, that Pete had to sell the mineral rights just to service the note, and then a piece of the ground itself. The land my grandfather planted the windbreak on the year my mother was born. Pete sold it in pieces to strangers, and I do not think he ever once understood what he was letting go of, because to Pete it was never dirt his father loved. It was collateral.

The money slipped away from both of them the way money slips away from people who did not build it and do not understand it. Not because of any curse or any justice from above. It slipped away because a thing you did not earn sits loose in your hands. My grandfather knew that, and I think that is half of why he did what he did. He did not leave me out of the money to punish me. He left me out of it to save me from it. He gave the loose thing to the ones who wanted it, and he gave the thing that could not slip, the work, the count, the blend, the name, to the one who would hold it tight.