The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin

Jim had been a mechanic at the implement dealer for twenty-six years. When he got too sick to lie on a creeper under a combine, he went on short-term disability, and then that ran out. Cheryl worked the front desk at a dentist’s office and they cut her to three days so she could drive him.

Their savings were gone. All of it. The camper was sold. The second car was sold. They had taken a loan against the house in January.

Kathy was not in the same shape. Kathy and Dale were all right. But Kathy has always followed Cheryl, from the time she was four and Cheryl was six and they walked to the end of the lane together to wait for the bus.

If Cheryl jumped, Kathy jumped. If Cheryl was scared, Kathy was scared for her.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” Cheryl said to me. Her voice cracked on hurt. “I’m trying to keep a roof over Jim. And Ron said, he said you’ve been getting a deal, and it’s Mom’s money, and someday it’ll be all of ours, and Mom’s money is our money too.”

“Mom’s money is Mom’s money,” Mom said.

Nobody answered her.

I sat there with the paper and I chewed on it.

I could have argued. I had numbers too. The taxes. The mowing. The lane. Twenty winters of getting up at five to plow out a quarter mile of gravel so an old woman could get to the eight o’clock Mass at St. Mary’s.

I could have told Cheryl that Ron Petersen’s $200 average was wrong for those early years, that nobody paid $200 for dryland in Butler County in 2007. I could have pulled the farm records out of my truck. I keep them in a three-ring binder behind the seat.

But here is the thing. None of that was the point.

It was Mom’s land and Mom’s price, so there was nothing for me to owe them, and the only one at that table who could answer it was Mom.

Not me. Not a lawyer. Not Ron Petersen at the co-op. Mom.

She was sitting right there. Eighty-three that day and sharp as a tack, the same woman who still balanced her checkbook to the penny and did the crossword in the Omaha paper in ink.

So I folded Cheryl’s paper back up along its creases and set it in the middle of the table, next to the cake.

“Mom,” I said. “Would you set this year’s rent? Right now. In front of everybody. Whatever you write, I’ll pay it, and I’ll pay back whatever you think I owe on the years before.”

Cheryl’s mouth opened a little. Kathy looked up from the cake for the first time.

Mom looked at me a long minute over her glasses.

“In front of everybody,” she said.

“In front of everybody.”

The kitchen had gone quiet. I could tell the scoop had stopped. Lori told me later she stood at the counter with a bowl of ice cream in each hand and did not dare move.

Mom reached for the paper napkins Kathy had set by the cake. White ones, the cheap kind from the grocery store in David City, with the scalloped edge. She took one off the top and smoothed it flat on the table with the side of her hand.

Then she held out her hand to me.

“Pen,” she said.

I always have a pen. Seed corn pen, the kind the dealer gives out by the handful. I took it out of my coat pocket and clicked it and gave it to her.