The White Oak My Husband Sold

When he died, the will left the forty to me. Not to my mother, not to my sister Beth, not to Jeff and me together. Just Renee.

The deed in the county recorder’s office says so in plain type, and I had never thought much about it until that morning at the landing.

“Ma’am?” Lonnie said again. He had not moved. He was holding that clipboard like it had gotten heavy.

“I need to think,” I told him. “Please don’t cut anything new today.”

He looked at me a long time and then nodded once. “We’ll just skid what’s already down,” he said. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what this is, but I’m sorry.”

I had come home that Thursday only for clean clothes. Beth was in the middle of her fourth round of chemo in Springfield, about an hour and a half north, and I had been sleeping nine nights in a vinyl recliner beside her bed.

Her husband had left years ago and her kids were grown and scattered, two in Texas and one in Colorado, all of them with jobs they could not walk away from.

So it was me. I took my vacation days and my sick days and then some unpaid days, and I went.

I want to be fair about Jeff, because this is not a story about a bad man.

Jeff Albrecht builds decks and pole barns and kitchens all over Douglas, Ozark and Wright counties. He has run his own small outfit for nineteen years with two or three men under him.

He is a good builder. People call him back. He is the kind of man who will drive forty minutes on a Sunday because an old lady’s storm door won’t latch, and then stay and eat her pie.

We married when I was twenty-two. We have one son, Logan, who was twenty that winter and in his second year at the state university in Springfield.

In twenty-six years I had never caught Jeff in a lie. Not a big one. He was bad at lying, honestly.

His ears turned red. When Logan was little he couldn’t even keep a Christmas present secret past the first week of December.

So I drove down off that ridge in a kind of fog.

When I got to the house there was a new pickup in the driveway, a crew cab, dark blue, the dealer’s paper plate still in the back window.

Jeff had texted me a picture of it on Monday while I sat with Beth. “Too good a deal to pass up,” he wrote.

“Old one’s done. Will explain.” I had sent back a thumbs up. I had been holding a pink plastic bucket at the time and hadn’t thought twice.

Now I stood in my own driveway and looked at that truck, and I understood exactly where twelve thousand dollars of my grandfather’s oak had gone: into the down payment.

Jeff wasn’t home. His work trailer was gone. I went in, packed a bag of clean clothes for myself and some soft pajamas for Beth, and stood at the kitchen sink a long time looking out the window at nothing.

I did not call him. I wanted to. My thumb was on his name twice.

But I knew if I heard his voice right then I would say something I could never take back, and I have never been a woman who says those things.

When I got to the hospital I parked on the top level of the garage, turned the engine off, and sat there with my hands on the wheel while the windshield fogged over.