The Policy He Thought Was His
So when Gerald set his photocopy on my table, I did not have a piece of paper of my own to set down next to it. I had only what I knew, which felt, for one terrible hour, like it might not be enough.
I could have called the Farm Bureau office Tuesday afternoon and asked. I thought about it. But it was the week between a graveside burial and a scheduled memorial, the office was short staffed for a funeral half the town was attending, and more than that, something in me did not want to win this with a phone call. A phone call would have settled the money and left the doubt exactly where Gerald had planted it, in the soft part of my mother in law’s heart, in Kyle’s cousins, in the dozen relatives who would hear only that Marlene called down to the insurance office and got herself declared the winner. That is not the same as the truth standing up in a room and being seen by everybody who loved Dale enough to drive two hours for a covered dish lunch.
Gerald had found his photocopy going through Dale’s shop the week before, helping me sort through tools nobody but him would know what to do with, which I was grateful for, truly, because sorting through your dead husband’s wrenches is a job that near about broke me and Gerald did three solid days of it without complaint. In an old metal filing box under the workbench, the kind that holds receipts for seed corn and warranty cards for a chainsaw bought in 1989, there was a folder with Dale’s handwriting on the tab, and in it, old insurance paperwork from his bachelor days, including a carbon copy of that very first 1996 form.
I think Gerald found it and felt something crack open in him that had been cracked for a long time already.
Gerald farms too, two sections over, and he has not had an easy decade. His combine threw a rod last September in the middle of harvest and the repair bill ran past nine thousand dollars he did not have sitting anywhere. His wife Donna works the desk at the clinic in town and between the two of them they are one bad year away from the bank calling the loan, and everyone in the county who farms knows exactly what that phone call sounds like because most of us have gotten some version of it ourselves.