The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

“Found this in the old shed on the 80 when I was cleaning it out,” Vern said. He set it down on the dock beside me. “It was Earl’s. I didn’t feel right throwing it out, and I didn’t feel right giving it to your dad.”

“Why not my dad?”

Vern thought about that. “Because he’d have put it in a sale,” he said. “And it ought to be here.”

He put a hand on my shoulder, once, heavy and warm. Then he turned around and walked back up the hill toward the gate, and did not look back. He knew what the evening was for.

I did not open the box. I wanted to, but I did not. I wanted to wait.

She came a few minutes later. I heard her car on the lane and the door shut and then nothing for a long time, long enough that I thought she might get back in and go.

Then I heard her in the grass.

She walked down through the pasture slowly, the way you walk into a room where somebody is sleeping. She stopped at the edge of the dock and stood there with her hands in her jacket pockets.

She did not sit. She looked at the new boards and the fence and the gate. She looked at the cattails along the east bank for a long time.

“You planted those,” she said.

“I moved some from the old stand.”

“Grandpa’s.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Her chin was doing the thing it used to do when she was little and trying not to cry in front of the doctors in Omaha.

“Mom said you bought it,” she said. “Somebody at the title office told somebody at church. She’s been calling me all week.”

“I figured.”

“She’s mad. She says you did it to make them look bad.”

“I did it because it was Grandpa’s pond,” I said. “That’s all. I didn’t do it at anybody.”

Brittany looked out at the water. The sun was right at the top of the trees on the far side, and the light came across the pond flat and gold and caught her face.

“Jess,” she said, “I need to tell you what Mom told me the week before my wedding.”

I waited. I had gotten good at waiting, working nights. You learn that most people will tell you the true thing if you just keep still long enough.

“She said you didn’t want the land,” Brittany said. “She said she asked you, and you told her to sell it. That you said, let Britt have her day. That you didn’t want anything to do with farm ground, you had your nursing.”

The words sat there on the dock between us.

“I never said that,” I said.

“I know.” Her voice broke on it. “I know you didn’t. I think I knew then. I just wanted to believe her so much that I let myself.”

She sat down then, all at once, the way a little kid sits, right on the boards with her knees up. She put her face on her knees.

“I found out at Thanksgiving last year,” she said into her jeans. “Dad had a couple of beers out on the pontoon, and he said something about how you never even got asked. He didn’t know I heard him.”

“Britt.”

“I’ve been sick about it since. Every picture from that wedding, I look at your face, and I see you smiling, and I know what it cost you to smile.” She lifted her head. Her face was wet. “You gave a toast about this pond. About us fishing here. And I sat there in a sixty thousand dollar tent bought with it.”