The Little White House Next Door

What I could not do about it

People have asked me since why I did not just stop him, or call somebody. The truth is simple.

It was a joint account, with both our names on it, and either one of us could have walked into the bank and taken every dollar.

I am a teller. I have counted out that kind of withdrawal to husbands and to wives, and I have smiled and said have a good day, because it is their money and it is not my business.

There was nothing to report and nobody to call. There was only a promise, and he had broken it.

So I went back inside and finished the beans. I fried pork chops. I put plates on the table and called everyone, and three of us came.

Brooke stayed in her room, and I let her, because I did not have anything to tell her yet.

Dennis ate fast and went back out to look at the car in the driveway under the yard light. Cody went out with him after a while.

I could hear them through the screen, Dennis explaining the engine, Cody asking how fast it would go, and Dennis saying “faster than your mother wants to hear about.”

I washed every dish by hand that night, though we had a dishwasher. I needed something to do with my hands while I thought.

The farmhouse

We had bought the farmhouse eight miles north of town in 2006, the spring after our wedding, when Brooke was not even an idea yet.

It was a square two-story house on three acres with a windbreak of cedars on the north side and a hip-roofed barn that had not held a cow since the Carter years.

We loved it. We brought both babies home to it. Cody learned to ride a bike on the gravel drive and came in bleeding about once a week.

Brooke had a 4-H lamb in the old barn for three summers running and cried every year at the Rice County Fair when it sold.

But a house that old eats money. The roof needed doing, the furnace was older than I was, and the well pump went out twice in one winter.

When the Kessler boys bought the ground around us, they offered a fair price for the house too, because their oldest was getting married and wanted to live close.

We sold it in May for one hundred sixty-two thousand. We still owed seventy-eight on the mortgage.

When the title company was done, we had eighty-four thousand dollars, which was more money than either of us had ever had in one place in our lives.

We sat at the table in that kitchen the last night before the movers came, with boxes stacked everywhere, and we decided.

We would rent in town for a year or two. We would put every dollar in savings and leave it there. It was for Brooke and Cody.

Brooke wanted nursing school at Hutchinson Community College and then maybe Wichita State. Cody did not know what he wanted except that it had an engine in it.

Whatever they chose, a start or a down payment or a few years of not drowning, the money would be there.

“Every dollar,” Dennis had said, and he had reached across the table and put his big hand over mine. “We don’t touch it, Ang. Not for a boat, not for nothing. Our folks never had anything to hand us. We’re going to be different.”

I believed him. I believed him because he meant it when he said it.

That was the part that kept me awake on Elm Street, staring at the ceiling fan going around. He had meant it, and eight days later it had not been enough.