The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days

“Army wives get housing money,” Ed Deckard said, and he held the letter out to me across the threshold like it was a church bulletin.

I was standing in the doorway of our rent house on Cherokee Street with June on my hip and a dish towel over my shoulder. It was a Tuesday evening, the third of March, and the wind had that raw edge it gets in northeast Oklahoma before spring makes up its mind.

Behind me I could hear Addie reading her spelling words out loud to Wyatt, who did not care one bit about spelling words. The kitchen smelled like the Hamburger Helper on the stove. The TV was on with nobody watching it.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Rent goes to twelve hundred on the first of April,” Ed said. “It’s all in there. Thirty days’ notice, like the law says.”

I unfolded the letter with one hand. Our rent had been $850 a month for the four years we had lived in that little two-bedroom with the carport and the chain-link fence. Now it was going to be $1,200.

“Ed, that’s three hundred and fifty dollars,” I said.

“I can do the math, Kayla.”

“Josh leaves Thursday.”

“I know when he leaves. Whole town knows. That’s why I’m telling you now.” “The government’s going to be paying you a housing allowance the whole time he’s gone. I’m not a fool. I know what an E-5 with dependents draws.”

He was not wrong about that part. When the Guard puts a soldier on active orders for a deployment, he draws a housing allowance, and with a wife and three kids it is more than $850 a month.

What Ed was wrong about was what that money was for.

The Man Who Was Not Home

Josh was at the armory that evening. He had been there every evening for two weeks, packing connexes and sitting through briefings about wills and powers of attorney.

He was a sergeant in the Oklahoma Army National Guard, an E-5, and he had been in eleven years. He worked days on the county road crew, running a motor grader on the gravel roads out east of town. His unit was going to Fort Bliss for a few weeks of training and then on to Kuwait. Ten months, they told us. Home in January if nothing changed.

When he went, his county paycheck went too. That was the part Ed did not do the math on. The housing allowance was not extra money falling out of the sky. It was the Army’s way of keeping a roof over the family of a man who had just traded his day job for a desert.

“Is that Daddy?” Addie called from the kitchen.

“No, baby. It’s Mr. Deckard.”

Ed shifted on the porch. He was sixty-six, broad through the shoulders, with a seed cap and a canvas coat that had seen a lot of fence lines. He owned nine rental houses in our town, which in a town of five thousand people makes you about as close to a landlord baron as we have.

“Ed,” I said, and I kept my voice down because June had her head on my shoulder. “We have never been late. Not once in four years. Josh fixed your gutters on this place himself last fall and never asked you for a dime.”

“And I appreciated it.” He did not sound like a man who appreciated it. He sounded like a man reading off a card. “But the market is the market. Twelve hundred is what the house will bring.”

“It won’t bring that from anybody in this town.”

“Then I guess we’ll find out.” He stepped back off the porch. “Tell Josh good luck.”

He walked to his truck, a gray Silverado with a toolbox across the bed, and drove off. I stood in the door until June squirmed and the smell of the skillet told me supper was starting to scorch.