The Bill My Daughter-in-Law Handed Me
By Kingman I had the gasoline figured. By Cunningham I had the beef.
By the time I turned up my own lane, with the cottonwoods along the creek gone yellow and the wind pushing the windmill around, I had stopped. I shut off the truck and sat there with my hands in my lap and felt ashamed of myself. Because that was her way of looking at the world, not mine, and I had caught it like a cold inside of two hours.
I carried my suitcase in. I put Addie’s horses on the refrigerator. I made a pot of coffee I did not want, and I sat at the kitchen table where I have sat through every hard thing in my life, and I thought about what to do.
You should know what there was to stop, or the rest of this will not make sense.
My husband died four years ago, in March, of his heart, in the machine shed with the radio on. We had one child. Brian was never going to farm, and Dale and I made our peace with that when he was about fifteen and could take apart a lawn mower engine faster than he could sort a calf. He went to school in Wichita and went to work for one of the aircraft plants, and he is good at it, and I am proud of him.
He married Courtney nine years ago. She came from Kansas City, from a family I met exactly once, at the wedding, and never again. She is smart and she works hard and she is a careful mother. I have said that to people who expected me to say something else, and I will say it here.
But she kept track. From the very beginning, she kept track. Who had hosted which holiday. Who had driven farther. If I brought a pie she would say, “Oh, now I owe you one,” and I would laugh and say nobody owes anybody for pie, and she would look at me as if I had said something in another language.
So I just did things and did not mention them. It seemed kinder.
The Fridays were the first thing. Then the beef. Every fall my neighbor Jeff, who rents my pasture now, finishes a steer for me along with his own, and I have it butchered at the locker in Pratt, and half of it goes in my deep freeze and half goes east in coolers. Courtney has not bought a pound of hamburger since Addie was a baby. I do not believe she has ever wondered what that would cost at a grocery store. I know I never did.
And then there was the money.
When they bought the house on Meadowlark Court two years ago, they came up eleven thousand dollars short on the down payment. Brian told me on the phone, late, in the voice he used to use when he had dented the pickup. I had just sold Dale’s stock trailer and the last of our own calves. I drove the check down myself.
“Don’t tell Courtney it’s from me,” I said to him in his driveway. “She’ll feel like she owes me, and she’ll hate living in it. Tell her it’s your share of the farm. That’s true enough. It would all be yours someday anyhow.”
He did not like it. He did it.