The Bill My Daughter-in-Law Handed Me
And every month after that, on the first, I mailed him four hundred dollars. That is what Jeff pays me to cut the hay ground, forty-eight hundred a year, split out by the month. I told Brian to put it on the house and to call it the same thing. His share of the farm.
So for two years my daughter-in-law had been getting a check from my hay field every month and believing it was something my son was owed.
I had done that. I want to be fair. I had set it up so she could not thank me, and then I was hurt in her front hall that she had not.
I sat at my table until the coffee went cold, and what I decided was simple.
I was not going to send her a bill. Not for one mile, not for one roast. I would sooner have cut off my hand. I was not going to call Brian in Tulsa and make him choose between his mother and his wife over the telephone. And I was not going to pout.
I was just going to believe her.
She had told me, in a neat table with a box around the total, what her household was. A place where a week of family is a cost, and costs are paid. All right. I could not afford that place. I am a widow on a hay lease, a little pasture rent, and Dale’s Social Security. Two thousand dollars is most of what I live on for two months.
So I would stay home. And I would assume, the way she had assumed about me, that she would not want anything from my house she had not paid for either.
The first Friday was the hardest.
I was packed out of habit. I had the overnight bag by the door at noon before I remembered. I unpacked it one piece at a time and put every piece back in the drawer it came from.
Around four my telephone buzzed. It was Courtney, by text message, which is how she prefers to talk to me.
“What time are you getting in? I have a showing at 6.”
I looked at it for a long while. Then I typed, with one finger, the way I do.
“I won’t be able to come this weekend. Give Addie my love.”
Three dots came and went. Then: “Is everything okay?”
“I’m just fine, honey.”
Nothing after that.
I went out and helped Jeff’s wife, Brenda, pull the last of her tomato cages, because I could not stand to be in the house. Brenda has known me thirty years. She looked at me across the garden and said, “It’s Friday, Peg.”
“I know what day it is.”
“You going to tell me?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.” And she handed me the wire cutters and let it be, which is why she has known me thirty years.
The first of November came. I wrote out the electric bill and the propane, and my pen was already on the next check before I noticed what I was doing. Pay to the order of Brian Harlan. Four hundred dollars. I had written that check twenty-four times.
I capped the pen. I put the hay money in my own savings for the first time since Dale died. It felt like stealing. It was my own hay field.
The second Friday, I did not pack.