The Folder My Cousin Could Not Lose
“I’m sorry, Uncle Eldon, but I can’t make exceptions for family. How would that look?”
My cousin Rhonda said it across the counter of the Rennick County Assessor’s office on the 19th of December, and she said it kindly. That was the worst of it. She smiled the way you smile at a man who has held a door for you at the bank.
My father stood there in his olive Army cap, the one that says Vietnam Veteran in yellow thread, with both hands on the head of his cane so the shaking would not show. He was 83 years old. He had asked me to drive him to the courthouse that morning, because he wanted to ask her face to face, and I had let him.
“Rhonda,” he said. “I filed the form. Dennis mailed it in June. It’s the same form your aunt filled out for 12 years.”
“I understand that, Uncle Eldon. But there’s nothing in the file. Nothing came to my office.” She touched her computer screen as if it were a Bible. “The state won’t accept a late application. I’d love to help you. I’d be breaking the rules for my own family, and I can’t do that.”
Behind her, at the long table where the deputies sat, a woman with gray hair bent over a stack of folders and did not look up. I noticed that. I did not know yet what it meant.
“The bill is $2,571,” my father said. “It ought to be $857. That’s the exemption. That’s the whole difference.”
“I know it’s hard.”
“It’s the third year.”
“Then I’d file early next year,” Rhonda said gently. “In March, maybe. Just to be safe.”
My father looked at her for a long moment. He is not a man who begs. He drove truck for the Army for two years and farm trucks for 40 after that, and I never heard him ask a stranger for a thing. He nodded once, said, “Merry Christmas, Rhonda,” and turned toward the door.
I held it for him. She called out, bright as a bell, “Tell Aunt Leona hello.”
Aunt Leona was my mother. She had been in the Alder Bluff cemetery for nearly three years.
That is where I stopped being patient.
I did not say a word in the truck. My father stared out at the stubble fields, white with the first real snow, and I drove the nine miles to his house on Fourth Street with both hands on the wheel.
I ran line for the rural electric co-op for 41 years, and I retired in September with a bad shoulder and a good pension. A lineman learns that paper is what keeps a man alive. Nobody touches a wire without a signed clearance, and nobody argues with the signature. So everything important I ever mailed went certified, with the little green return receipt, and I still do it out of habit.
I helped him out of the truck and into the kitchen. That was when I saw what was on his table.
Under a manila folder on the table was a stapled booklet with a real estate company’s name across the top. A listing agreement. Hugh Albers, who sold half the houses in Rennick County, had already signed his half. The list price was $118,000, for a house with a new roof and a furnace my father had put in himself in 1996.
“Dad.”
“It’s just paper,” he said. “Hugh stopped by Tuesday. I haven’t signed it.”