The Coupon Book I Mailed My Daughter in Law

She looked at them like I had handed her a pair of dead cats. Then she said, “You can keep them here,” and shut Harper’s door.

So I kept them. I stood there holding two pairs of little rubber boots while she lifted Hudson into his car seat on the other side and walked around and got in and backed around in our yard.

Harper waved at me through the back window. I waved back. I kept waving until the SUV turned out at the end of the lane and went up the road past the Bergstrom place toward town.

Then I went in the back door and set the boots down on the rug in their spot, pink on the left and green on the right, where they had stood two days a week for most of the last three years.

I stood there in the mud room for a while. I could hear the vacuum pump running out in the milk house, and the radio Rick keeps on the farm station, and one of the cows bawling for her supper.

I smelled my own sleeve. I could not help it. It smelled like what it was. Silage and warm cow and the iodine dip we use on the teats after milking. It smelled like thirty-one years of my life.

Here is what Madison did not know when she said that to me. I think you ought to know it before you decide what you think of either one of us.

My son Nolan is thirty years old. For eight years he worked on the line at the tractor plant in Waterloo. Good job, good benefits, the kind of job men around here used to retire from.

A year ago last April they laid off a whole shift. Nolan was on it. He came out to the farm the day he got the news and sat in his pickup in the yard for a full hour before he came in the house.

When he finally came in, he sat at my kitchen table, the same one where I braid Harper’s hair, and he put his face in his hands. I hadn’t seen my son cry since he was in high school and his dog got hit on the county road.

Iowa unemployment runs sixteen weeks now. It used to be longer. Nolan did the math out loud right there at my table. Sixteen weeks of checks, and a house payment of fourteen hundred dollars a month on a split-level in town they had bought two years before.

Madison works the front desk at a dental office in town. She is good at it. She’s the kind who remembers your kids’ names and which tooth bothered you last time. But a receptionist’s pay was not going to cover that house and two little ones by itself.

“Mom,” he said, “I’ll find something. I will. I just need a little time. But I can’t let Madison find out how bad it is.”

I asked him why not. I said she’s your wife, she’s going to find out.

“She already thinks her folks were right about me,” he said. “Her dad told her I’d never amount to anything. If she finds out I can’t even make the house payment, I don’t know what she’ll do. Please, Mom. Just until I get on somewhere.”