The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
The funeral lunch was ham buns, scalloped potatoes, and three kinds of bars on the long folding tables in the church basement, the same lunch the ladies of St. Paul’s had served for every funeral I could remember.
I was sitting at the end of a table with a plate in front of me that somebody had filled, and I had not eaten one bite of it.
Jeff had been gone six days. It still did not seem like a fact.
He was forty-seven. He had walked out to the machine shed after supper on a cold Tuesday in March to look at a hydraulic leak on the planter, and when he did not come in by nine, I went out with a flashlight and found him.
So I was sitting there in the basement, listening to the coffee urn tick and the women in the kitchen rinse cups, when my brother-in-law Randy pulled out the folding chair across from me and sat down. Scott sat down beside him a moment later.
Randy was fifty-two, the oldest. Scott was forty-nine. Jeff had been the baby, and the three of them had farmed together since their dad retired, in a partnership their dad had set up so the ground would never get split into pieces too small to farm.
Randy put his big hands flat on the table for a second, the way he did before he said anything hard.
Then he took a long envelope out of the inside pocket of his suit coat and slid it across to me, past the salt and pepper.
“It’s the buyout,” he said, low enough that nobody else could hear. “Like the agreement says. We had it figured with the bank this week. We didn’t want you to have to worry about it.”
I opened the flap. It was a cashier’s check from the bank in Hastings, made out to me, for five hundred thousand dollars.
Scott cleared his throat and looked at the tablecloth instead of at me. “The house goes with the partnership, Melissa. You know that. We’d need you out by planting. We figured that gives you plenty of time to find something in town.”
Plenty of time. It was the middle of March. Planting would start the end of April, the first week of May if it stayed cold. That was about seven weeks to empty out twenty years.
I looked over at the next table. My daughter Abby, who was twelve, was sitting with my sister and pushing a lemon bar around her plate with a plastic fork.
She had not cried at the service. She had held my hand so hard that I had marks on my fingers.
I want to be honest about what went through me in that moment, because I have told this story a few times since, and people always want me to say I was furious.
I was not furious. I was too tired to be furious. Mostly I felt like somebody had opened a door in winter and let all the warm air out of a room.
Here is the thing, and it is the reason I did not fight them.