Two Children and One Home Place

“I want her to lose something,” I said. “Renae. I want her to find out what leaving costs. She went off and built a nice life with a nice husband, and she calls every other Sunday and tells me about her shifts, and not one time in twenty years has she asked what it’s like to be the one who didn’t go. So I thought, give the farm to Kurt. Let her hear it from me. Let her feel it.”

Dale didn’t say anything.

“That’s not fairness, Dale. I’ve been calling it fairness since Thanksgiving. It’s something else. I don’t like what it is.”

There was more, and it was worse, and I made myself say it too. “And I want Kurt to stay. If the place is his, he’ll never leave it. He’ll never take a job in Waterloo, and Tara won’t talk him into Minnesota, and I’ll have him a quarter mile down the road till I die. I would give a child a whole farm to keep him from leaving. I don’t know what kind of mother does that.”

The furnace clicked off. The house got very quiet, the way a farmhouse does at nine below, when the nails in the walls start to pop.

“A regular kind,” Dale said finally. “I expect.”

“Don’t be nice about it.”

“I’m not being nice. I’ve known it since 2011.”

I turned over then. His face was just a shape, with the yard light coming through the curtain behind it. “Known what?”

“That you keep a book on her.”

I didn’t answer, because he was right, and because the book is hanging beside the refrigerator about eleven feet from where we were lying.

It is a calendar from the feed store in Sumner, the kind with a different farm scene every month and a square for every day. I buy a new one every December and hang it on the same nail over the old one, because I have never been able to throw one away. And in the corner of each square, in pencil, whenever Renae calls, I make a small R. Two or three times a month. I have done it since the fall she moved to Colorado.

I am not going to defend it. I will only say that at first I did it so I wouldn’t forget to tell Dale she’d called. Somewhere along the way it stopped being that. It became a thing I looked at in December, flipping back through the pages, counting. Twenty-three last year. Kurt’s pickup is in our yard before six every morning of the year, and nobody has ever had to put a mark on that.

Dale’s voice came out of the dark again, slower than before. “You want to hear mine?”

“Your what?”

“My sixth reason. For going down the middle.”

I said I supposed I did.

“Spring of 2005,” he said. “She was seventeen. You were at church circle. I was in the machine shed greasing the planter, and she came in with her work gloves on and asked if she could run it that April.”

I said nothing. I don’t remember this. That is the thing I have to be honest about, I don’t remember it at all.