The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

Norma

Norma was sixty that year. She had lost her hair two years before and it had grown back gray and short, and she was still thin from it.

She had on a blue cardigan buttoned wrong by one button.

“I know I’m the last person you want to see,” she said through the screen.

“I’ll go if you want me to go. I just made this, and I wanted to bring it, and I wanted to say something. Then I’ll go.”

I looked at her a long time. Then I opened the door.

She came in and stood in the middle of my kitchen holding the pie, and I took it from her. Rhubarb. The rhubarb was up in everybody’s garden that week. I set it on the counter.

“Sit down, Norma,” I said, and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. The same table, the same chair Earl had sat in.

She sat. She folded her hands on the oilcloth. Then she opened her purse and took out an envelope and set it in front of me.

“That’s five hundred dollars,” she said. “It’s not much. I know it’s not. My sister in Ogallala sent it to us, and I want you to have it. There’ll be more every month. I don’t care what the lawyer says. There’ll be more.”

I did not touch it. “Norma, you don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.” Her voice was very steady, the steadiness of somebody who had practiced. “I didn’t know, Rachel. I want you to know that. I swear before God I didn’t know where it came from.”

Her Reason

Then she told me. Her cancer had been two years of it. Surgery in Omaha and radiation in North Platte and then a drug that their insurance would not cover.

Earl had told her the hospital worked out a payment plan. He had told her the Hagens’ old church had helped.

“I believed him,” she said. “I wanted to believe him. I was so sick, Rachel. I couldn’t even go to the mailbox. He handled all of it.”

She said it started small, the way Earl told it to her the night after the branding. One hunting check, the fall of her diagnosis, when a bill came that he could not pay.

He told himself he would put it back by Christmas. He told himself the Sorensens would never miss it.

“And then Kyle got sick,” Norma said, “and you were gone so much, and he said it got easy. He said it got so easy it scared him. And he couldn’t stop.”

She looked down at her hands. “He sat in that pickup on the road for three hours last Saturday. He told me. Watching all of you.”

I did not say anything. I could not.

“He came home after Kyle talked to him,” Norma said.

“And he sat at our kitchen table, and he cried, Rachel. I have been married to that man thirty-six years. I had never seen him cry. Not when his mother died. Not when they told us about my cancer.”

“What did Kyle say to him?” I asked, though I knew.

“He said Earl, go home to Norma.” She pressed her lips together hard. “Earl said nobody had ever been kinder to him than that, and nobody had ever made him feel smaller. Both at once.”