The Christmas I Stopped Buying Their Love

Delmus married Loveta a year and a half after we lost his father. I liked her well enough at the wedding. She was polished in a way Verdon girls usually aren’t, sharp haircut, French-tipped nails, always dressed like she might get photographed. She grew up in Springfield and had worked a few years in property management before she and Delmus met at a farm equipment trade show, of all places. She was funny in short bursts and quiet in long ones. I told myself quiet didn’t mean cold.

The first time she came to Sunday dinner at my house, she walked through every room before she sat down to eat. She ran a hand along the mantel Wendell built with his own hands out of a fallen walnut tree. She looked out at the pasture, the old red hay barn, the gravel drive that goes on a quarter mile before it meets the county road.

“This is an awful lot of space for one person, Hesper,” she said, setting down her purse. “You must rattle around in here.”

I laughed it off. I said something about how the space kept me company, and we ate pot roast, and I didn’t think much more of it. It was just an observation, I told myself. People say things.

But she said it again, three weeks later, differently. “You know,” she told me over coffee, while Delmus was out checking on my gutters, “at some point you’ll want to think about something smaller. Something easier to keep up. All this equity is just sitting here doing nothing for you.”

She said the word equity the way some men say the word gold. Like it was a thing you could weigh in your palm.

Delmus stared at the coffee pot the whole time she talked. He didn’t argue with her, and he didn’t agree with her either. He just went very still, the way he used to go still as a boy when his father and I argued about money in the next room. After that visit, his Sunday calls started slipping to every other week. Then to a text on Sunday afternoon instead of a call. Then, some weeks, to nothing at all until I called him first.