The House on Elm Street
To a man like that, my job looks like something that happens to you. The phone rings at 2:10 in the morning, and you get up and go. You come back two days later smelling like diesel and coffee. You sleep in the afternoon with foil on the bedroom window.
Hannah turned the check over in her hands. She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t push it back either. She just looked at it like it was a letter in a language she used to be able to read.
“Daddy,” she said quietly.
“You don’t have to answer me today,” Rod said. “Think it over. Talk to the bank. That money’s yours either way, as long as the deed’s right.”
And then everybody looked at me.
I didn’t say a word.
I want to tell you why, because I have been asked more times than I can count, mostly by men at the depot who say they’d have flipped the table. I’d have liked to. For about four seconds I could see myself doing it.
But I knew something nobody else at that table knew. And Hannah didn’t know it yet either. If I said it right there, in front of her brother and her aunt and her mother, it would turn into two men fighting over her across a pumpkin pie.
She deserved better than to find out the biggest thing I’d ever done for her as a comeback in her father’s dining room. So I picked up my coffee. I drank some of it. I set it down.
And I knew one more thing about Rod. Not the whole of it, but the outline. His folks had lost their farm north of town in 1985, when he was nineteen. He never talked about it. Not once in the six years I’d known him.
Hannah folded the check in half and put it in the back pocket of her jeans. Joyce got up and started clearing plates, which is what Joyce does when she can’t stand a room anymore. Hannah’s aunt asked about the weather in Omaha.
We left an hour later. Rod shook my hand at the door like nothing had happened, firm and quick, the way he shakes a customer’s hand when the paperwork is signed.
“Drive safe,” he said. “Roads are slick out by the river.”
Hannah didn’t talk the whole way home. It’s eleven miles from her folks’ place to our duplex on the south side of town, past the elevator and across the tracks, and she watched the dark fields the entire time with her hands in her lap.
I drive a 2014 Silverado with 212,000 miles on it. Rod sold it to me, used, the first year Hannah and I were married. He gave me a fair price and he never let me forget it. That night the heater took six miles to get warm, and neither one of us said anything about it.
When we got inside, she took off her shoes and stood in the kitchen in her socks. Our kitchen in the duplex is so small you can open the oven and the refrigerator at the same time and they hit each other.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked.
She wasn’t angry. That was the worst part. She sounded tired, the way she sounds after a double at the hospital when somebody’s grandma didn’t make it through the night.
“Give me till morning,” I said.