The For Sale Sign In My Yard

Pam left for Indianapolis the fall after she graduated high school, 1979, and she built a good life there, a husband named Doug, two kids now grown and gone themselves, a house in a subdivision with a name instead of a road number. She comes back for Thanksgiving most years and Christmas some years. She called our mother every Sunday, which I will say for her, she never missed a Sunday call even in the hardest years, and I do not want to make her sound like she never loved our parents, because she did. She loved them from four hours away, in the way you can love something you have decided not to live inside of.

I was the one who stayed. I married a local boy and farmed the home ground and raised nobody, Mark and I were not given children though we wanted them, and so when our parents got old there was nobody standing between me and the job but me. I do not regret staying. I want that understood plainly before I go any further into this, because there is a way of telling a story like mine that makes the one who stayed sound like a martyr, and I was not a martyr, I was a daughter who lived two miles down the same road she grew up on and so the phone rang for me first every single time.

I drove my mother to dialysis three mornings a week for the last two years of her life, forty five minutes each way to the clinic in Greensburg, and I sat in that waiting room so many Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays that I knew the other families’ names before I knew most of my own cousins’. I changed my father’s oxygen tanks and learned to read the gauge in the dark because he liked to sleep with the window cracked even in January and I was always coming in at two in the morning to check it. I missed my own friend’s fiftieth birthday party because Mama had a bad spell. I did not miss it because I am a good person. I missed it because somebody had to be there and the somebody was always going to be me, since I was the only one close enough to drive.

Pam sent money sometimes. Pam sent a very nice blanket once, and flowers more than once, and I am not trying to say she did nothing. I am saying that love measured in distance and love measured in hours spent are two different currencies, and when our mother passed two years ago and our father followed her seven months after, nobody had ever sat down and decided out loud which currency the farm itself was supposed to be paid out in.

I did not call a lawyer after I hung up the phone with Pam that day. I want to explain why, because people who have not stood where I was standing tend to ask me that first, and it is a fair question.