The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

Roger smiled, but it was the kind of smile you give a calf that has gone through the wrong gate. Patient. Sure the calf will figure it out. He picked up his plate and went back to his table.

I want to be fair to him, because what came later depends on it. Roger is not a loud man.

He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t cuss in front of women, and he has never once raised a hand to anyone I know of. He is just a man who decides.

Caleb’s mother, Ann, used to be the one who softened his decisions. She died six years ago this past March, of a cancer they found too late.

Caleb was twenty-three. He told me once that the farm got quieter after that and Roger got harder.

We danced that night anyway. The deejay played “Amarillo by Morning” for my dad and me. Caleb danced with his grandma, and with my little cousin, and with me four times, and we did not talk about the forty again.

Sunday we opened cards at my parents’ kitchen table. People in our town give cash at weddings, mostly twenties and fifties tucked inside cards with doves on them. It came to four thousand one hundred dollars.

“Branson money,” my mom said, stacking it. “For the extras.”

Monday morning at seven, while I was still in my sock feet folding our clothes into the duffel bag, Caleb’s phone rang on the dresser. He looked at the screen and turned it so I could see. Dad.

He put it on speaker.

“Branson’s off,” Roger said. “I called the condo people. Figured you two would want to stay close to your investment this week.”

“Dad,” Caleb said.

“Offer stands,” Roger said. “Two thousand an acre. You think about it.” And he hung up.

I sat down on the edge of our bed. The duffel bag was half packed.

There was a swimsuit in it I had bought at the Walmart in Clinton and had never worn, because when do I ever get to wear a swimsuit.

I wanted to call him back. I had my thumb on his name.

I had whole paragraphs ready, things I had been holding in since the reception, and some of them were not words a new daughter-in-law should say to her husband’s father.

Caleb put his hand over my phone, gently.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ve watched people argue with him my whole life. Mom, Uncle Lyle, the bank, the elevator. Every single time he digs in deeper. You call him today, he’ll never let go of that forty.”

So I didn’t call. That is the honest reason. It wasn’t that I was scared of Roger. It was that my husband knew his father, and I believed him.

We couldn’t pay for Branson ourselves, either. That was the other honest thing. Every spare dollar we had was going to the December payment, and four thousand dollars in wedding cards was the whole cushion we owned.

We sat there a while. The furnace kicked on. Out the window of our little rented house on Franklin Street, I could see the neighbor’s maple turning orange at the top.