Two Children and One Home Place

I said I knew. I said, “We’ll get it done.” Then I said nothing else for two weeks, and neither did he, because it was Christmas and there was a program at church and Kurt’s youngest had the flu.

The week after New Year’s we called the lawyer in Waverly, a woman named Marlys Brandt who did my aunt’s estate. Marlys said she’d be glad to see us in March. Then she asked one question over the phone, and she asked it kindly, and I have not been able to put it down since.

“Before you come in,” she said, “I’d like you two to know who gets the home place.”

Dale and I have been married forty-three years. We had never once answered that question out loud.

So that was the Sunday. The plat was on the table, the percolator between us, a skin of ice on the inside of the window over the sink. Out past the glass the Peterson eighty lay under snow, so smooth you couldn’t tell where the field stopped.

Dale pulled the plat toward him. He looked at it a long time over the top of his reading glasses. He found the pencil and held it, the way he does, like a man holding a thing he hasn’t decided to use.

“Well,” he said. “It’s not complicated.”

“No,” I said.

“Down the middle.” He drew his thumbnail along the page, along the road between the home eighty and the Peterson eighty, a line that wasn’t there. “Kurt gets half. Renae gets half. Equal.”

He said it the way he reads the grain price off the radio. Flat. Finished. As if the thing were already in a drawer.

I said, “No.”

He waited. Dale can wait longer than anybody I have ever met.

“Kurt gets the home place,” I said. “The house, the grove, all of it. He buys the rest from us at a fair price over time. Renae gets whatever Renae gets, but the place is Kurt’s.”

Dale put the pencil down. “Why?”

I had the reasons ready. I had them lined up in my head like the jars on a canning shelf, and I took them down one at a time and set them on the table.

“Kurt has farmed beside you since 2008,” I said. “That’s eighteen years.”

“All right.”

“You’ve paid him like a hired man. Less, some years. You paid him eleven hundred dollars a month the first winter and he never once said it was too little.”

“That’s so.”

“He lives a quarter mile down the road and he is in this kitchen every single day. He has been at that door at six o’clock every morning that I can remember, and Tara brings supper over whenever your heart acts up.”

Dale’s heart had acted up in March. They put in a stent at the hospital in Waterloo, one night, and he was home before the weekend.

“And Renae,” I said, and I heard my own voice change, “has been to this house six times in the last ten years. I counted. She calls when she calls. She has a job, she has a husband, she has a boy who plays hockey. She made her choices and they were good ones. But they were hers.”