The Lights on Route 9

The trailer

I looked at everything. There was a rental in Nordby, a little bungalow by the elevator, but the landlord had a nephew moving back from Minot.

There was an apartment over the hardware store in Larsen, but it had one bedroom and a hot plate.

What there was, honestly, was a 1998 single-wide at the court on the south edge of Nordby. Three bedrooms, new skirting, $650 a month.

The woman who managed it was kind to me and told me the furnace was only four years old.

I want to be clear about something. I have no shame about trailers. My aunt raised five kids in one outside Devils Lake, and every one of them turned out better than fine.

Half the good people in this county have lived in one at some point.

What stuck in me was not the trailer. It was the way Dale said it at that table.

He said it the way you say a thing to make sure the kids hear who lost. He wanted them to look at me and see a woman going down in the world.

That night, after the kids were in bed, Emma came and sat on the end of my bed in the dark. She had her knees pulled up in her sweatshirt.

“Are we really going to live in a trailer?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Would that be so bad?”

She thought about it. “No,” she said. “It’s just that he said it like it was a punishment.”

I could not argue with that. I lay awake a long time after she went back to her room, listening to the combine dryer hum out in the yard.