The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin

She looked at me over her glasses the way she used to look at me when I came home late from a basketball game.

“I said I’ll set the rent,” she said. “Now drink your coffee.”

The rent she set that first year was $120 an acre. The going rate around Butler County was maybe $130 then, a little more for the good bottom ground. It was not a gift. It was close to fair, a little under, and she said the little under was for the yard.

Because the deal came with Dad’s rules, and Mom wrote them right on the legal pad.

Keep the yard mowed. Keep the lane plowed out in winter so she could get to church. Keep the windbreak trimmed. Pay the taxes on the home place, house and all. Take her to her appointments when the weather was bad.

I did every one of those things for twenty years. I am not telling you so you will think I am a saint. I am telling you because Cheryl’s paper had two columns on it, and neither column had any of that.

Mom raised the rent a few times over the years. Always her number, always written on a piece of paper and handed across the table at New Year’s. By last year it was $190 an acre.

The going rate around us last year was closer to $275. I knew it. Everybody at the co-op knew it. The good dryland east of town went for $290 at a family lease last fall.

So I knew there was a gap. I never pretended there wasn’t.

What I also knew was the taxes on that quarter and the house ran right around $8,400 a year now, and I paid every dime of them on top of the rent. Mom’s price was her price. She knew what she was doing. She always did.

Back at the table, Cheryl was talking.

“We went low,” she said. “We want you to know that. We averaged it out. Twenty years. The going rate averaged around two hundred, and Mom’s price averaged about one-seventy. That’s thirty an acre. Thirty times 160 times twenty.”

“Ninety-six thousand,” Kathy said quietly.

“And there’s three of us,” Cheryl said. “So our two shares are sixty-four. We’re not asking for yours.”

She said it like she was being generous. I think in her mind she was.

I looked at Mom. Mom was looking at Cheryl. Her face had gone very still, the way it did in church when somebody’s phone went off during the prayer.

“Where did you get two hundred,” Mom asked.

“Ron Petersen,” Kathy said. “From the co-op. He said that’s what the ground’s been worth on average. He said Marvin’s had a sweetheart deal for twenty years and everybody in the county knows it.”

Ron Petersen. Ron has been telling everybody in the county what everybody in the county knows since about 1985. Most of it is wrong. Some of it is half right, which is worse.

“Cheryl,” I said. It was the first word I had said since she set the paper down.

She looked at me. Her chin was up but her eyes were wet. That was when I saw it, plain as the cake.

She was not greedy. She was scared.

I knew Jim was sick. Everybody knew Jim was sick. His kidneys had been going for two years and last fall they went the rest of the way. He was on dialysis in Columbus three mornings a week now, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Cheryl drove him every time.

What I had not known, and found out that night in pieces, was how bad the money had gotten.