The Policy He Thought Was His
But Dale had farmed this stretch of Ringgold County, Iowa, for thirty four years, and you cannot plant corn and beans on four hundred acres for that long without the whole township knowing your name, and so the church had already set the real goodbye for the following Saturday. A proper memorial, Pastor Hovde called it, with the fellowship hall and the covered dishes and every woman in three churches bringing her good casserole dish with her name taped to the bottom in masking tape so she’d get it back. That was the lunch I meant. That was the lunch Gerald had five days to decide whether he still wanted to say what he’d said in my kitchen.
I want to tell you about Dale first, because you can’t understand the rest without him.
I met Dale Tipton at a church softball game in 1994. I was twenty six and working the register at the Hy-Vee in Mount Ayr, living in a rented room above my aunt’s garage, not dating anybody, not looking to. Dale was pitching slow underhand lobs so the kids could hit them, laughing every time one sailed over his head into the ditch, and something about a grown man willing to look foolish for a seven year old’s sake went straight through me.
We married in October of 1996, in this same church, in a dress my mother helped take in because I’d lost weight worrying about the wedding instead of eating. Dale was thirty two. He had been married to no one before me, had dated nobody serious, had spent his twenties the way a lot of farm boys do out here, working his father’s ground and his own small rented acreage and putting money into equipment instead of into himself.
Before me, early in 1996, when he bought his first real life insurance policy through the Farm Bureau, the agent who sold it to him was a family friend named Roger Dietz, a boy Dale had gone through 4-H with, and Dale had nobody to name on that form but his brother. He was single. His parents were both still living and in no need. Gerald was the only other person in the world who shared his last name, and so Gerald went down on the paper as beneficiary, because that is what a bachelor does when a stranger in an office hands him a form and tells him somebody has to be on it.
That was the spring of 1996, months before Dale and I ever stood up in front of Pastor Hovde’s predecessor and said our vows. I didn’t exist to Dale yet, not in any way that mattered.
The January after our wedding, Roger Dietz drove his own truck out to our place, because that’s what a Farm Bureau agent does in a county this size, he doesn’t mail you a form, he sits at your kitchen table and drinks your coffee and fills it out with you. I remember it only because I remember being newly married and embarrassed that our kitchen table was still my aunt’s old one, scratched and wobbly on one leg, and Roger didn’t seem to notice or care.