What Linda Ames Said at the Door

My house key went into the lock on our back door and stopped halfway, like it had hit a wall.

I pulled it out and tried again. It was the same brass key I had carried for six years, the one on the ring with the plastic tag Kaylee painted in second grade. It would not go in.

The porch light was off. The yard light on the pole was on, and under it, on the back porch and down the steps, sat everything we owned that would fit in a box.

Kaylee’s school clothes were in a laundry basket. Bo’s bike was leaned against the rail. Our kitchen table was out there with the chairs turned upside down on top of it, the way you set them when you mop.

And Travis’s work boots were sitting on the top step, side by side, laces tucked in, like he had just stepped out of them.

I was still in my funeral dress. I had his gray cardigan on over it because the church basement had been cold and it still smelled like him. Behind me in the van were three kids, two big sprays of carnations, a ham in foil, and a guest book with ninety-one names in it.

We had buried my husband at two o’clock that afternoon.

Taped to the storm door, at eye level, was a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve. It said Notice of Possession in big letters. Under that, smaller, it said Ames Rentals, and a phone number I knew by heart because I had called it every month for six years.

Under that it said the amount. $1,100.

How we got there

Travis worked at the co-op elevator on the east side of town for nine years. He ran the leg, he drove the loader, he climbed the bins when something choked. In harvest he worked from before daylight until the last truck was dumped, and he came home smelling like milo dust and diesel.

On the twenty-sixth of September a belt slipped in the headhouse during corn harvest, and he went up to clear it the way he had a hundred times. Nobody saw him fall. Steve, the manager, found him on the steel grating twenty feet below the catwalk.

They flew him to Wichita. He lived thirty-three days.

I was a school bus driver for the district. I ran route four, sixty-two miles of gravel morning and afternoon, and I got paid by the route. I did not run route four for five weeks, because I was sitting beside a bed in an intensive care unit two hours from home.

Workers’ comp paid the hospital. That part worked the way it was supposed to. What it did not do was pay anything to me while I sat there, not right away, because the paperwork for a man who is still alive and the paperwork for a man who has died are two different stacks, and both stacks were slow.

We were already behind. We had been short in September because Bo needed glasses and the van needed a fuel pump. Then October came and went and I did not pay it at all. On the first of November I sent Roger Ames two hundred dollars I had borrowed from my mother. That left $1,100.

Roger owned our farmhouse and about half the rentals in town. He was sixty-eight, he went to the Methodist church, and he collected his own rent. He drove a white Silverado with a toolbox in the bed and he wrote receipts by hand in a carbon book.

He was not a warm man, but I had never known him to be a cruel one. When our water heater went out three winters before, he had a new one in by suppertime.

I had left him two messages from the hospital. I told him what happened. I told him I would catch up. He never called back. I thought that meant he understood.