Two Children and One Home Place

I saw her do the arithmetic. She is a nurse, and nurses count things for a living. She pushed back her chair and walked to the refrigerator and lifted the whole calendar off its nail. Hanging behind it was last year’s, and behind that the year before, a stack of them on the one nail, each month with its little penciled R’s down the side like a fever chart.

She let them fall back. “Do you mark when you call me?”

“I don’t call you.”

“I know you don’t.”

“I was waiting,” I said. “You were the one who left. I thought, if she wants to talk she’ll call, and if she doesn’t, then I’ll know.”

“Mom.” She stood there with her hand still on the refrigerator door. “I call every other Sunday because you never call. For twenty years I’ve been waiting for you to. I thought you were letting me know I’d gone too far.”

I sat back down. Dale reached over and put his reading glasses back on.

Nobody shouted, and by nine o’clock, which in my kitchen is the middle of the morning, we had moved on to the land.

Kurt said what he’d said to us on Sunday. He wanted to farm it all and buy it, and he didn’t want the house. Renae listened to him with her chin on her hand.

“Twenty years at what price?” she said.

“Whatever the appraiser says. Twelve thousand, give or take, on the good ground.”

“That’s close to three million dollars for the whole place,” Renae said slowly. “Kurt, you can’t pay three million dollars.”

“I can pay it over twenty years. At the right interest. With Mom and Dad holding the paper.”

“Eighteen years, and you started at eleven hundred dollars a month.”

“It went up.”

“By how much?”

“Some,” said Kurt.

“Take fifteen percent off,” Renae said. “Out loud, at this table. I’m saying it so you know I said it. You stayed, you worked, you earned a discount, and I want to be the one who gives it to you.”

Kurt shook his head. “I’m not taking a discount. That’s charity. It’s the same thing as taking the farm because I stayed.”

“It’s not the same. It’s me saying it.”

“Then ten,” Kurt said.

“Fifteen.”

“Ten, and you get to write it down.”

Renae looked at Dale. Dale looked at the ceiling. “I’m not refereeing this,” he said. “Neither one of you has ever lost an argument.”

They settled on ten. She made Dale write it in the margin of the plat and put the date.

When it was Renae’s turn, she asked for less than any of us expected.

She didn’t want a check. She said that twice. She did not want to be bought out, and she did not want to rent out acres she’d never see. The payments, she said, should go to Mom and Dad for as long as they lived, since it was their retirement, and whatever was left could be divided however Marlys figured was fair.

“I’d like the creek forty,” she said. “The timber side.” She put one finger on the square I’d printed in my best 1965 letters. “And I’d like to know I can come back to the house without asking.”