The Coupon Book I Mailed My Daughter in Law

I should have said no. I know that now. I knew it a little bit then, too. But he was my boy, sitting at my table with his face in his hands, and I said yes.

That night I talked to Rick. Rick is fifty-five, and he is not a talker. He was sitting in his recliner with his reading glasses on, doing the feed bill.

“Fourteen hundred a month,” he said, and took his glasses off. “That’s a lot of milk.”

“I know it.”

“Prices aren’t great.” He rubbed his eyes. Then he said, “He’s our boy. Couple of months, Carrie. Then he’s on his own feet.”

It was not a couple of months. It was fourteen.

Our milk check comes from the co-op twice a month, the middle and the end. With eighty cows and the price where it has been, there is not a lot left over once you pay the feed, the vet, the breeding, the equipment payment and the electric bill for running the parlor and the bulk tank.

Fourteen hundred a month came out of what was left over. We stopped eating supper out on Fridays. Rick put off replacing the skid loader tires. I didn’t buy a winter coat, and I quit getting my hair done in town and just let the gray come in.

Nolan gave me the coupon book from their bank. It’s a little local savings bank on Main Street, the kind that still gives you a book of payment slips for the year, one coupon for every month.

On the first of every month I tore out a coupon, wrote a check out of our farm account, and drove into town to hand them both through the window to Janet at the teller line.

Janet never said a word about it. Janet goes to our church and she knew whose loan it was. She’d stamp the coupon, hand me the receipt, and ask how the cows were milking. That’s how it is in a town like ours. People notice, and they decide what to say out loud.

Every month, inside the front cover of that coupon book, I wrote the date and the check number. I am a farm wife. I write everything down. Rick says I’d write down the weather if he let me, and I do.

Nolan did odd jobs. He hauled hay for the Bergstroms all summer. He plowed snow for the church and a couple of businesses last winter. He applied at everything from the ethanol plant to the hospital in Waterloo. Nothing stuck.

And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I kept Harper and Hudson, because a sitter in town costs a hundred and fifty dollars a week for two kids, and I didn’t want Madison paying that on top of everything.

Those two days were the best days of my week. I will not pretend otherwise.

Harper is six. She is serious and bossy and she wants to know how everything works. She learned to mix milk replacer for the calves when she was five, standing on an overturned bucket at the milk house sink.

Hudson is four. He doesn’t care how anything works. He cares about the barn cats, and the skid loader, and whether Grandpa will let him sit up in the tractor cab and push the button that makes the wipers go.

They wore those rubber boots out to the hutches every Tuesday and Thursday and came back in muddy to the knees, and I’d strip them down in the mud room and run them through my tub before Madison came. I washed their clothes in my machine. I sent them home clean every time.