The Loan Papers I Signed Alone

After she graduated, around a hundred and thirty a month for ten years.

“A new nurse in Sioux Falls starts at about thirty-four an hour right now,” she said.

“I looked it up. I can pay a hundred and thirty a month, Mom. I can pay it the first month.”

She closed the folder. She put the highlighter back on its clip. Then she said the sentence I could not get out of my head for the next three days.

“I can wait a year. It’s fine. I’ll work at the café full time and save it and go next fall. Lots of people do that.”

Lots of people do. I know that. But I also know what happens to some of the girls who wait a year.

Somebody offers them more hours. Somebody offers them a ring. A year becomes three, and the folder goes in a drawer.

I did not say any of that to her. I told her we would figure it out.

I kissed the top of her head, which she let me do, and I did the dishes while she went upstairs.

Through the window over the sink I could see the light on in Jeff’s shop.

He was out there until almost eleven, and he never once came in to ask what Abby had said after he left.

Three days later, on a Thursday, Jeff came up the driveway behind a flatbed trailer from the implement dealer in town.

On the trailer was a brand new side-by-side, the kind with a dump box in the back and a cab with doors.

He had been talking about one for two years. He wanted it for the grove, for hauling firewood, for plowing the long driveway in winter without firing up the old tractor.

Those were all real reasons. I had heard every one of them.

What I had not heard was that he had bought it. He had not mentioned it at supper on Monday, when he told our daughter college was a scam.

He had not mentioned it the next morning, or the morning after that.

The salesman backed it off the trailer and handed Jeff the keys and a folder of papers. Jeff signed something on the hood of the dealer’s pickup.

Then he stood in the yard looking at it with his hands on his hips, the way he used to look at Abby’s lambs.

I came out on the porch drying my hands. “What did that cost?” I asked, and I tried very hard to keep my voice even.

“Twenty-four,” he said. “With the cab and the plow. I paid cash for it, Kris. Out of my bonus and the savings I’ve been putting back. Nobody owns a piece of it but me.”

He said that last part like it settled everything. In his mind, I think it did. Cash was clean. A loan was a hook.

He could not see what I could see, which was our daughter’s bedroom window right above us.

He called his dad from the yard. Arnie lives in a small house on the edge of town, in what used to be the depot agent’s place, and he drove out in his old pickup twenty minutes later to see it.

Arnie is seventy-two. He is lean and slow and wears a seed corn cap that he has owned longer than I have known him.

He walked all the way around the side-by-side without saying anything, and then he lifted the dump box and let it down again.

“Nice machine,” he said. Then he looked up at the house. “Where’s Abby?”