The Town Girl Who Bought the Farm Back

Easter

Easter that year was at Luke’s sister Karen’s house in Gibbon. Fourteen of us, two card tables pushed up against the dining table, ham and scalloped potatoes and the green Jell-O salad nobody eats and everybody expects.

Karen had set out the glass deviled egg plate shaped like a hen. It had been June’s. For a minute nobody could look at it, and then everybody did, and Cody asked if he could have the egg in the middle.

Walt sat at the head of the table because Karen put him there. He looked smaller than he had at Christmas. He had his good gray church coat hung over the back of his chair.

Before Karen’s husband, Jeff, could start the prayer, I stood up. Luke looked at me. I had not told him I was going to do it.

“Walt,” I said, “I want to thank you for something.”

The room went quiet the way a room does when everybody in it has heard the same story.

“Thank you for giving Luke that farm to grow up on,” I said. “For teaching him to drive a tractor before he could see over the dash. For the barn, and the creek, and every Sunday dinner at that table.”

I kept my voice even. “Whatever happens to that place, Luke had it. Our kids had it. Nobody can sell that part.”

Walt looked down at his plate. His jaw worked once, then again. He nodded one time and did not say anything. Jeff said the prayer, and we passed the ham.

In the car on the way home, with the kids asleep in the back seat, Luke asked me why.

“Because I’m going to buy it back,” I said. “And I didn’t want to do it angry.”

He drove a full mile without a word. Then he reached over and put his hand on my knee and left it there all the way into Kearney.

Saturdays

The Monday after Easter, I called a dentist in Hastings named Dr. Reinke. I had heard from a friend that his Saturday hygienist was retiring and nobody wanted the shift.

“It’s eight to four,” he said. “Every Saturday. Most of my farm families can’t come in during the week, so it’s a full book. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

For four years I left our house on the east side of Kearney at 6:30 every Saturday morning and drove forty minutes to Hastings in the dark half the year. I cleaned teeth for eight hours. I drove home.

Every Saturday paycheck went into a separate savings account at our bank on Central Avenue. We never touched it. Not once, not for the furnace, not for the transmission on the minivan in the second winter.

Luke’s snowplow overtime went in there too. When a storm came through, the county ran the graders and plows around the clock, and Luke would come home at four in the morning, eat a bowl of cereal standing up, and sleep three hours.

We did not take a vacation in four years. We drove the same minivan until it had 214,000 miles on it. Hailey’s school clothes came from the church rummage sale, and she never once complained, which I still think about.

The kids knew what we were saving for. We told them the first summer. Cody, who was five, asked if he could have his old bedroom back, the one at Grandma and Grandpa’s where he napped on Sundays. I said we would see.

Hailey made a chart on poster board and taped it inside the pantry door. A thermometer, like the one at church for the new roof. Every month she colored it up a little more with a red marker.