The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

I did not know then that I would think about that sentence for the rest of my life.

What Grandpa said and what Grandpa signed were two different things. His will, which he made in 1996 when Grandma was still living and Brittany and I were small, left the farm to his son outright.

There was no line for granddaughters. There was no trust and no wish written down. There was a man who meant to change it someday, and then there was a morning when he did not wake up.

So the sale was legal. I want to say that plainly, because people always ask. There was nobody to call and nothing to file. The land was Mom and Dad’s, the same as their house and their car.

What it was not, I thought, was right.

I put my fork down at that Sunday table and folded my hands in my lap because I did not trust them.

“He always said it was for us,” I said. “For Brittany and me. You heard him say it a hundred times.”

Mom set the gravy down. She had a soft face and soft hands, and she used both when she wanted something to be over.

“He said a lot of things, honey. He was old. And Brittany is getting the benefit of it, so it’s going to you girls in a way.”

“It’s going to a wedding.”

“It’s going to your sister,” Dad said, and he finally looked at me. His eyes were wet. That surprised me more than anything. “She’s never asked us for anything big. Not once.”

I wanted to say that I had never asked for anything big either. That I had never asked for anything at all, because I had learned early that asking in our house went one direction.

Mom reached over and patted my hand, two little pats, the way you calm a dog that has barked at nothing.

“You were always fine, Jessie,” she said. “You’ll be fine. You always land on your feet.”

I was 29 that winter. I had been a nurse’s aide for nine years before I finally went back to school, and I was in the second semester of the nursing program at Southwestern Community College in Creston.

I worked nights as an aide at the care center in Corning, three or four a week. I worked Saturdays at the café on the highway, eggs and pie and coffee refills for the same farmers every week.

On Sunday mornings, before church, I cleaned the bank in town. Vacuum, trash, glass doors, the bathrooms. Forty dollars cash from the branch manager, who left it in an envelope under the coffee maker.

I slept in pieces. I studied in the break room at two in the morning with a residents’ call light blinking down the hall. I lived in a rented trailer on the edge of town with a space heater and a cat named Biscuit.

Mom was right about one thing. I was fine. I was always fine. I had been fine since I was eleven years old and figured out that the easy child gets left alone, and the left alone child gets forgotten.

Brittany had been the sick one when she was little. Asthma bad enough that she was in the hospital in Omaha twice before she was seven. Mom sat beside that bed for days, and I stayed with Grandpa.

I do not hold that against anybody. A mother goes where the hurt is. But habits get made in hard years, and in our house, the habit was that Brittany needed and I managed.