The Flour Sifter They Left Me
Meanwhile, down the gravel road
I would be lying if I said I did not keep track of what happened to the rest of it. Small towns being what they are, you do not have to try very hard.
The eighty acres went first. Denise and Brett could not agree on anything, which surprised nobody, and rather than farm it or rent it, they sold it to that outfit down in Arkansas inside of six months and split the money. And the money did what money does when it comes easy to people who never worked for it. Brett put a down payment on a bass boat and a truck to pull it, and within two years the truck was repossessed out of his own driveway in the middle of the night, which the whole town knew about by lunch. Denise and her insurance man took a cruise and remodeled a kitchen she never cooked in, and then his business went sideways, and the last I heard they had refinanced the house in Kansas City twice.
The farmhouse itself, the one Della had kept up for fifty years, sat empty because neither of them wanted it and neither would pay to fix it, and it did what empty farmhouses do. The gutters went. The porch sagged. Somebody broke a window and the weather got in. The last time I drove past it, one Sunday, the yard where I had learned to shell peas was waist-high in ragweed and there was a faded REALTOR sign in it that had been there so long the phone number had bleached off. Eighty acres and a good house and ninety thousand dollars, and inside of five years there was almost nothing left of any of it that you could point to.
Aunt Carol’s ninety thousand is not my business, but I know she loaned a big piece of it to Brett for the boat that got him nowhere, and I know she never got it back, and I know she stopped coming to church around then, which in a town like ours tells you most of what you need to know about how a person is doing.
I did not gloat. Mostly I felt sad about it, in a tired sort of way. Della had worked her whole life for that land and that money, and it went through their fingers like sand because none of them understood that the money was never the inheritance. The money was just the thing you could see. They took the thing they could see, and it was gone in five years, and I took the thing they laughed at, and I will hand it to somebody someday who will still be using it in fifty.