The Room Over Haskins Hardware
It sat in his machine shed for forty years. He refinished it the winter after Grandma died, when his hands needed something to do. He gave it to me when I finished community college.
It is solid oak and heavy, with one drawer that sticks unless you lift it just so. Travis carried it into the spare room for me and called it a boat anchor.
Then he stood back in the doorway and said it looked like it had always been there. That is the man I married. I need you to know that before I tell you the rest.
He is not a cruel man. He is a quiet one, the son of a quieter one, and some things in his family were never said out loud.
Travis is a process operator at the ethanol plant out on the highway. Twelve-hour shifts, two weeks of days and two weeks of nights. He has been there since he was twenty-two.
For years the plant ran all the overtime a man wanted, and Travis took most of it. That overtime was how he made the house payment as a single man.
In August, the plant cut overtime back. Margins, the board, something. Travis told me in one sentence at supper and then talked about the Hawkeyes. I did not ask what it meant for us.
I know now that I should have asked. I know now a lot of things I did not know at that kitchen sink in September, with the legal pad on the table behind me.
Neither of us touched it all evening. Travis watched the news and the weather and went to bed early. I sat in the dark spare room and thought about the word “fair” for a long time.
His father charged his mother rent. I knew that the way you know things about your husband’s family, in pieces, at holidays, from what people stop saying when you walk into the kitchen.
Ron Brandt owned the farmhouse outright when he married Denise in 1984. A few years later, when Denise took a job in the school cafeteria, he told her that since the house was his, she would pay toward it out of her check.
Denise paid him two hundred dollars a month for thirty-one years. Ron called it her share. He called it fair. Travis grew up hearing that word at that table.
Nobody ever told him it was strange, because his mother never said so. Ron died three years ago, of his heart, out in the hog barn. At the funeral, Denise did not cry.
I remember thinking she was in shock. I understand now that she might have been something else.
So when Travis said “fair,” I heard Ron. I did the math in the dark. Two hundred a month for thirty-one years came to seventy-four thousand, four hundred dollars.
I loved Denise, but I did not want to be her. And I did not want my husband to turn into his father. That was the part that scared me most.
I paid him the first month.
People have asked me why, and some have said it was weak. I paid it because I wanted to see what it felt like, and I wanted to see what he would do with it.