The House That Rolled Down the County Road

One hundred and thirty-two checks

For eleven years, Jake wrote that check.

He wrote it the winter the transmission went out of my car. He wrote it the month Cole had his tonsils out and our deductible ate the savings. He wrote it the spring the shop cut everybody’s hours.

We never missed one. Not once. Jake would sooner have skipped a meal than show up at his father’s door short.

Gordon would take the check, fold it once, and slip it in the pocket of his work shirt. He never said thank you. He never said anything. He would nod, and sometimes he would ask Jake to help him with a calf or a stuck gate while he was there.

Ruthann used to slip me things. A pound of hamburger from the locker. A sack of sweet corn. A twenty for the kids’ school pictures that she pressed into my hand and folded my fingers over.

“He’s not a bad man,” she told me once, in her kitchen. “He’s just a hard one. His daddy was harder. You should have seen how that old man treated him.”

Ruthann died six years ago of a stroke, in March, while she was hanging sheets on the line. After that, there was nobody to soften Gordon. And nobody to soften the first of the month.

I did the math one night when I could not sleep. Five hundred dollars, twelve months, eleven years. One hundred and thirty-two checks. Sixty-six thousand dollars.

That is what a two-acre corner of grass in the Nebraska Panhandle cost us. Grass that land men in Alliance told me rented for maybe fifty dollars an acre a year.

I never said it to Gordon. I barely said it to Jake. But I carried the number around with me like a stone in my shoe.

The night after

When Jake came out of the shower that April night, Gordon was already gone. I was still sitting at the table with his empty cup in front of me.

I told him everything his father said, word for word. I watched my husband’s face go from confused to gray.

“He said that?” Jake asked. “He actually said the house is his?”

“He said anything on his ground is his. He said he’s been to see Bill Hanson about his will.”

Jake sat down hard. He is forty-one and built like a fence post, and I had never seen him look small before. He looked small that night.

“Mom would never have let him say that,” he said quietly.

“I know, honey.”

“What do we do?”

I did not have an answer. I had a shoebox full of carbon copies and a knot in my chest.