The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

Grandpa was the one who noticed. He was the one who drove to my school concerts when Mom was in Omaha. He was the one who taught me to clean a fish and back a trailer and tell when a heifer was close.

He was the one who said, “Both of you.” Every single time. Like he knew somebody had to say it out loud.

The deposit was due in March. Vern Akers had farmed the ground next to Grandpa’s for forty years, and he paid cash. The closing was quick. By the time the redwings came back to the pond, the land had a new name on it.

It sold for $175,000. That was low, even for hill ground with a timber draw and an old fence. I knew it then, and so did half the county. Dad wanted it done fast more than he wanted it done well.

The wedding was in June, at a resort on West Okoboji with a white tent on the lawn and a string quartet from Spencer. It cost $60,000. I know because Mom told everybody, the way you tell people the price of a good steer.

The rest of the money went to a new pickup for Dad and a pontoon he kept at Lake Icaria. He named the pontoon after Mom. I never set foot on it.

I stood up at my sister’s wedding as her maid of honor in a dress I paid for with two weeks of café tips. I gave a short toast about the two of us fishing at Grandpa’s pond. People laughed in the right places.

Brittany cried during my toast. I thought at the time it was the champagne and the sunset and the day. I would find out later that it was not.

I smiled in every picture. Then I drove four hours home through the dark, slept four hours, and took a pharmacology exam on Monday morning. I got a ninety-one.

For the next year and a half, I did what fine people do. I kept going.

I finished my clinicals. I learned to start a line on an old man whose veins rolled like garden hose. I learned to sit with a family in the hallway and say the hard thing slowly.

I quit the café in my last semester and kept the bank and the care center. I graduated in a borrowed gown, and Mom and Dad came, and Dad shook my hand and held on a second longer than usual.

I passed my boards on the first try. I took a job on the medical floor at the little hospital in Corning, nights at first, twelve hour shifts, three a week. My first full year paid a little over sixty thousand dollars.

That was more money than I had ever seen in my life. And I did not buy one thing with it.

No new car. My old Impala had a hundred and ninety thousand miles and a passenger door that only opened from inside. I kept driving it. No trip. No furniture. Biscuit got a new scratching post, and that was the extravagance.

I paid my rent and my student loan and my phone. I put the rest in a savings account at the same bank I used to clean. By the end of that first year, the balance was $14,212.

I did not tell anyone what it was for. I am not sure I had said it to myself in so many words. I only knew that every time I drove past the turn to Grandpa’s place, my chest went tight.