The Farm My Daughter Called Worthless

Twelve years ago, the county ran the new stretch of Route 60 through the east end of this property. A communications company wanted the ridge for a tower. A solar co-op wanted the flat pasture behind the barn. I signed both leases quiet, under my name only, and I never told a soul, not even you, because I had a feeling, even back then, about which way things were headed with Elvira and her husband.

The letter explained it plainly after that. The tower lease and the solar lease together brought in just under thirty four hundred dollars a month, deposited for twelve years into an account at the Clarksburg bank, an account he had put solely in my name the year he signed the first lease. He had never touched a dollar of it. He’d let it sit and grow, and between the deposits and the interest, the balance stood, as of the date on that letter, at two hundred and sixteen thousand dollars.

I set the page down and had to breathe for a minute before I could pick it back up.

He explained the rest further down. Six years back, my son in law had come to him privately, asking him to co-sign a loan against this farm to help cover a bad stretch in his brokerage business. Dorris had said no, the only time in his life he ever told our son in law no to his face, and he wrote that watching how coldly Elvira treated him for months after that refusal had told him something he wished he hadn’t learned. He wrote that he loved our daughter with his whole heart and always would, and that loving her honestly meant admitting she had built her life on a foundation that measured people by what they could be useful for, and that he was terrified, given time and money and no one left to check her, of exactly what she might decide I was worth to her once he was gone.