The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

I did not say anything. I have learned that when someone starts talking in a waiting room, you let them.

“I’ve got a note at the bank that I lie awake over,” he said. “Deb’s hospital bills are still not paid off. Insurance covered a lot. It did not cover all of it. Not even close.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Nobody does,” he said. “Not even Cody, all of it. Forty-four thousand a year, guaranteed, for twenty-five years. Do you know what that means to a man my age? It means I get to hand this farm to my son instead of to an auction company.”

He rubbed Duke’s ear. “I told myself you two could build anywhere. I told myself that a lot. I’m not saying I was right. I’m saying I told myself.”

I wanted to tell him that I understood, and part of me did.

I also wanted to tell him that he could have sat us down and told us this in March, before he signed, instead of after. I said neither one.

“Bring him back if he stops eating,” I said. “Call me at home, any hour. I’ll come out.”

He looked at me then, for the first time in that whole visit. “You’d do that,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“He’s family,” I said. I meant the dog. I think Gene knew I meant more than the dog.

Duke lived five more weeks. Gene called me twice at night, and both times I drove out and sat on his kitchen floor with that old dog’s head in my lap while Gene held the light. The second time was the last time.

Gene buried Duke under the elm in his yard the next morning. Cody dug the hole. I stood back with Gene’s daughter, Amy, who had driven over from Concordia, and none of us said much.

After, Gene stood looking across the fields to the west, and I knew what he was looking at. You could see it from his yard by then.

His panels. And past them, across the section road, the new tin roof of our house against Grandma’s cedars.

He did not say anything about it. But he stood there a long time.

In September, the house was close. The siding was on and the shingles were on and the plumber had come and gone.

We were down to trim and paint and a hundred small things nobody tells you about.

One afternoon Grandma walked over from her house with a spade over her shoulder, which at eighty-four is not a thing I like to see.

I ran out the front door to take it from her and she would not let go of it.

“I need you to dig, but I’m choosing the spot,” she said. “Come help me with the lilac.”

My grandmother’s lilac grows along the south side of her house. It is a big old common lilac, purple, taller than the gutter, and every May it makes her whole yard smell like heaven.

Her mother planted it. Grandma has told me the story my whole life, but she told it again that afternoon, kneeling on a folded feed sack by the root of that bush, working the spade down beside a young shoot.