The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days

Orders on the Fridge

Josh got home at a quarter to nine. He came in smelling like diesel and gun oil and the cold, and he kissed the top of my head and then went straight to the fridge, because he always went straight to the fridge.

His orders were stuck to the freezer door with a magnet shaped like a John Deere tractor. Four pages, stapled. I had put them there the day they came because I could not stand to have them in a drawer. Every time I opened the freezer for ice, there they were.

He saw the letter on the counter before he saw the leftovers. He read it standing up. Then he read it again.

“He came by tonight?” he asked.

“About six.”

“While I was gone.”

“While you were gone.”

Josh set the letter down very carefully, the way he set things down when he was trying not to throw them. He was not a yeller. In twelve years of marriage I had heard him raise his voice maybe four times, and two of those were at a cow.

“I’ll go over there in the morning,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Kayla.”

“You have two days left with these kids,” I said. “You are not spending one hour of them on Ed Deckard’s porch.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table, and I sat down across from him, and we did what we always did, which was look at the numbers.

The lease had gone month to month two years before, when the original one ran out and nobody bothered to sign another. That meant Ed could raise the rent with thirty days’ notice and there was nothing to fight about. He had done it the legal way. There was no number I could call to make him stop.

We could have paid it. I want to be honest about that too. With the housing allowance and my teller check from the bank three days a week, we could have paid $1,200 and still eaten.

But I knew what that extra $350 a month was supposed to be. It was supposed to be the money that kept me from panicking when the van needed tires. It was supposed to be our cushion for ten months of me alone with three kids.

And I did not want to hand it to a man who looked at my husband’s orders and saw a raise.

“Daddy’s farm,” I said.

Josh looked up.

“Grandpa’s house,” I said. “It’s just sitting there. Dad’s been saying for two years he doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“Kayla, that house has been shut up since the funeral. There’s no power. I don’t even know if the well works.”

“Then we find out.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. “You’d be seven miles out. By yourself. With June.”

“With June and Addie and Wyatt and a shotgun I know how to use and a father who lives four miles past the mailbox,” I said. “And no rent, Josh. Dad won’t take rent. You know he won’t.”

He was quiet a long time. Then he got up, went out to his truck, and came back with a manila folder from the briefings.

“There’s a thing,” he said. “In the packet. The legal office at the armory went over it. If a soldier gets deployment orders, he can end a lease. You send the landlord written notice and a copy of the orders, and that’s it. No penalty.”

He found the page. It was a form letter, with blanks to fill in. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, it said across the top.

I got a pen out of the junk drawer. Josh filled in the blanks in his careful block capitals, the same ones he used on the grader logbook. He signed it. I took his orders off the freezer door and put the letter and the orders together in my purse. The bank had a copier. I would run the copy in the morning.

“We’re not going to fight him,” I said. “We’re just going to go.”

“That’s the same thing,” Josh said. “Just quieter.”