The Granddaughter Who Paid Her Way

My name is Ardelia Applewhite. I grew up on sixty acres outside Latham that my grandfather cleared and fenced with his own hands back when a man could still do that and call it a life’s work. He raised cattle on it for forty years before his knees gave out and he leased the pasture to a younger farmer down the road, and he still lives in the house he built, two fields over from the one my parents raised us in. Latham is the kind of town where the feed store still runs a tab for regulars, where the volunteer fire department holds a pancake breakfast every spring, and where everybody at the Baptist church on Sunday already knows your business before you’ve had a chance to tell them yourself. I loved growing up there. I love it still. But a small town remembers everything, including who pays their way and who doesn’t, and I spent three years quietly aware that mine was the name people mentioned when they wanted an example of a responsible daughter.

I had my own apartment picked out once, a little one bedroom above the hardware store on Main Street, back when I was twenty four and closer to having a deposit saved than I ever got again. I told my mother about it over coffee one Saturday morning, excited in a way I hadn’t let myself be excited about anything in a while, and she nodded along and said that sounded nice, before mentioning, almost as an afterthought, that the water heater in the house had finally given out and Dad didn’t think they could cover it this month on top of everything else. I gave them the deposit money instead. The apartment above the hardware store went to somebody else, a schoolteacher new to town, and every time I drove past it for the next two years I told myself it hadn’t mattered, that there would be another one, that patience was a virtue and I had plenty of it to spare.