The White Oak My Husband Sold

I didn’t want to tell her. She had enough. But Beth has been reading my face since I was in diapers, and she just lay there looking at me until I gave in and told her the whole thing in a whisper.

When I was done she was quiet a long time. Then she reached over and took my hand with her cold thin fingers, the hospital bracelet sliding down her wrist, and squeezed it harder than I expected she could.

“Jeff Albrecht has never done a sneaky thing in his life,” she said.

“He’s too plain to be sneaky, and I mean that kindly. If he did this, he’s drowning in something. Go home Monday and find out what it is. Go fix whatever that is.”

“I’m not leaving you,” I said.

“You’ll come back,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m too ornery to die in January. Now let me sleep.”

Logan came up on Sunday afternoon. He drove over from his apartment across town with a sack of hamburgers and a strawberry milkshake for his aunt, which she could not drink and made him set on the windowsill where she could look at it.

He sat with her for two hours and told her about his classes and a girl named Hannah, and Beth laughed for the first time in three days.

Walking me down to the cafeteria later, Logan stopped me by the elevators.

He’s taller than his father now, with his father’s hands and my grandfather’s quiet way of looking at a thing before he says anything about it.

“Mom,” he said, “Dad called me Friday night. He didn’t say what’s going on. He just asked me if I was doing all right, like three times. He sounded bad. Is something wrong with you two?”

I could have lied to him. I didn’t. I told him his dad had made a decision about Grandpa Ray’s land without me, and that I was going to talk to him Monday, and that nobody was getting divorced and nobody was going to jail.

He took that in with his jaw tight. Then he said, “Was it the oaks? The ones by the spring?”

And I told him I didn’t know yet what was left up there, and he looked at the floor and didn’t say anything else.

Monday morning Beth’s fever broke and her counts came up a little, and the nurse said she could go home to her own bed by the end of the week. Beth pointed at the door and said, “Go,” so I went.

I didn’t go to the house. I went straight out the county road and up our lane to the landing, because I wanted to see with my own eyes what was left before I heard one word from anybody about why.

It was a gray, raw afternoon, the kind of January day in the Ozarks when the sky sits right down on the ridges and the cold gets into your knees.

The lane was churned to soup. The mud came up over my boots before I’d taken ten steps.

The log truck was gone to the mill. The skidder was parked at the edge of the landing with its blade down.

Lonnie was standing by a fresh deck of logs with a can of blue paint, marking the ends, and he set the can down when he saw me. His son Dale leaned on a white pickup nearby, arms folded, saying nothing.