The Note Burning on Our Gravel Road

The rest of it

At a second bank across the street, I opened new accounts. There was a little over one hundred seven thousand dollars left.

I set aside five thousand for the furnace and a cushion, because I am a bookkeeper and I believe in cushions.

The other one hundred two thousand I split three ways. Thirty-four thousand for Cooper. Thirty-four thousand for Sadie.

Thirty-four thousand for Jake. Each one in a custodial account in their own name, with me as custodian until they turn twenty-one.

I did not tell Bonnie. I did not tell anybody but my sister Kim, who said, “Good,” and then, “What are you going to tell Bonnie?” and I said, “I don’t know yet.”

That was the truth. I knew I was not going to write her a check.

I did not know how to tell a woman who had just buried her son that she was getting nothing, without it sounding like I was telling her she had lost him for nothing too.

Spring and summer

Bonnie stopped calling after February. She came to Sunday dinner at her house only when I brought the kids, and she was polite to me in the way you are polite to a cashier.

She asked the kids about school. She cut Jake’s meat. She did not ask me anything. Gene talked about rain and the price of beans and the county putting new culverts in on 9.

In April, the copy of the release came from the county recorder’s office in a plain envelope. In May, the original note came back from the bank, with a red stamp across the front that said what it said.

I held that paper in my hands at the kitchen table for a long time. Eight years. Ninety-some payments. A lifetime of “Are we rich yet.”

I put it in the fireproof box with our marriage license and the kids’ birth certificates and Matt’s death certificate.

Then I took it back out and drove to the library in town and made a copy on their machine for fifteen cents.

I put the copy in a manila folder on top of the refrigerator. And I waited, because I knew when I wanted to do it.

Matt would have been thirty-seven on the seventeenth of October.

Summer was hard. Nobody tells you how small the hard parts are. His boots by the door. His coffee cup that nobody else would use. The seat in the truck I had to move up every time.

The landlord rented Matt’s eighty acres to the neighbor, Dale, who came over in July with his cap in his hands to ask if that was all right with me. I said Matt would have wanted it to be him.

Cooper started sleeping in Matt’s old T-shirt from the volunteer fire department. Sadie started telling the cat about her daddy every night.

Jake asked when Daddy was coming home from work until about June, and then he stopped asking, and that was worse.