The Coupon Book I Mailed My Daughter in Law

I want that on the record. I always sent them home clean.

That first night after Madison said what she said, I didn’t eat supper. Rick came in from evening milking a little after seven and found me sitting in the dark kitchen with the coupon book on the table in front of me.

“What’s that out for?” he said.

I told him what Madison said. All of it. The sitter, and the school, and the cows.

He stood there in his barn coat with the overhead light off and just listened. Rick has a way of going still when he’s angry. His hands stop moving. I watched his hands stop moving.

“She said that in front of the kids,” he said.

“In front of the kids.”

He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down without taking his coat off, which he never does. Then he put his hand flat on the coupon book.

“Does she know where this money comes from?”

“No. Nolan made me promise.”

“Fourteen months,” Rick said. “Fourteen months that boy has had to tell his wife.”

I said I knew it.

“You want me to go talk to him?”

I thought about Rick going into town, into that split-level, and having it out with our son in front of the grandkids. I shook my head.

“Then what do you want to do, Carrie?”

I told him I didn’t know. That was the truth that night. I didn’t know.

“Well,” he said. He got up and hung his coat on the hook by the door, above the little boots. “It’s your money as much as it is mine. It always has been. Whatever you decide, I’m with you.”

Then he made us both a fried egg sandwich, because that is what Rick does when he doesn’t know what else to do, and we ate them standing at the counter.

I did not sleep much that week.

The obvious thing would have been to call Madison and tell her. I know a lot of women would have. I picked up the phone twice. Both times I put it back down.

I had given my son my word. I had sat at that table and said yes, I won’t tell her. I don’t believe a person’s word expires just because the other person in the deal turns out to be wrong.

And if I’m honest, the second thing that stopped me was that I knew how it would sound. A mother-in-law calling up to say, “I’ve been paying your mortgage for over a year, so you owe me.” That’s a speech. Nobody ever changed their heart because of a speech.

The obvious other thing would have been to call Nolan and tell him I was done. I almost did that, too. But Nolan would have done what Nolan always does. He’d have said, “Mom, please, just one more month,” and I’d have done it.

On Thursday, the first Thursday without them, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went out at two o’clock to mix the calf bottles, the way I always do with Harper, and I made them alone.

Patches is a little Holstein heifer, mostly white, with one black patch over her eye like a pirate. Harper named her. Harper had been bottle-feeding her since she was three days old. That Thursday Patches stood at the front of her hutch and bawled for somebody who wasn’t there.