The Miller Place on the Courthouse Steps

“I’m not mad at Kim,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m not even mad at them. They think they said something nice.”

“They did say something nice.”

“Yeah.” He took the card out of his pocket and set it on the dash, bluebird up. “I’d just like to be worried about one time. Just to see what it’s like.”

I laughed, and then I was not laughing, and I looked out my window so he would not have to watch.

“Then we need a second job,” he said. “I’ll take harvest calls. Field service. Guys will pay cash to get a combine running at ten at night.”

“I’ll take the diner,” I said. “Patty’s been after me for a year.”

“You’re on your feet all week.”

“I sit all week,” I said. “That’s the trouble with billing.”

That was the whole meeting. We never had another one.

So for two years I billed insurance at the hospital from seven thirty to four, Monday through Friday, and on Friday nights, Saturday nights and Sunday mornings I carried plates at the truck stop out on the highway.

I learned to carry four dinners up one arm. I learned which of the seed corn salesmen tipped and which of them left a tract. I learned that a tired woman can sleep standing up beside a pie case for about forty seconds if she hooks one elbow over the top of it.

Nate worked his regular shift at the truck shop, and then from September to Thanksgiving he drove out to whatever field somebody was broke down in. He replaced a feeder house chain by flashlight in a sleet storm. He rebuilt an injection pump on a tailgate. One night he came home at two in the morning with three hundred dollars in his coverall pocket and a pumpkin pie a farm wife had made him take, and he ate half of it standing at the sink.

We ate a great many eggs. He sold his bass boat. He did not ask me first, and he did not make a speech about it. One Saturday the boat was in the yard and the next Saturday there was a rectangle of dead grass where the trailer had sat and thirty-six hundred dollars in the account.

And we went to every Sunday dinner at Ron and Judy’s that my shift allowed, and we told nobody what we were doing.

That was Nate’s rule, and I came to agree with it. If we said we were saving for a house, it would sound like a hint. It would sound like a bill sent two years late. Neither one of us wanted a dollar that had to be asked for.

Kim bought a little ranch house on Maple with a fenced yard. Jeff and his wife put their money down on a place in the new subdivision. Stacy kept hers in the bank until she finished school. We went to both housewarmings. I brought a casserole to each one and I meant every noodle of it.

“You two will be next,” Judy told me at Jeff’s, squeezing my arm. “You’re so good with money.”

“We’re working on it,” I said.

The second spring, in March, I was eating my sandwich at my desk with the county paper open to the legal notices, which is where a billing clerk’s eye goes whether she wants it to or not. The county trustee was auctioning off its surplus list. Those are the properties nobody paid the taxes on, and nobody redeemed, year after year, until the county ended up holding them.