The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin

I had not taken my coat off. I had come straight from checking cows, still in my tan canvas coat, my seed cap pushed back on my head the way Mom always told me looked like a hayseed. She had not said a word about it that night. She had other things on her mind.

The lamp light caught the lenses of her glasses. She bent over the napkin.

She wrote slowly. Her hand shakes a little now, and she does not like to write fast because the letters go crooked. She wrote one line. Then she stopped and thought, and wrote some more.

The candles on the cake were burning down. Nobody had blown them out.

Across the table, Cheryl had both hands flat on the table. Kathy had her arms crossed tight over her middle like she was cold.

Mom put the cap back on the pen and set it down. Then she leaned in and blew out the candles, all eight, in one breath, like it was any other birthday. She folded the napkin once, in half, and put her hand flat on top of it.

That was when the men came in.

Jim first, moving slow the way he does now, a bowl of vanilla in each hand. Dale behind him with two more. Lori stopped in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel.

Jim looked at the folded paper in the middle of the table and at Cheryl’s face and at Mom’s hand on the napkin.

“What did I miss,” he said.

Nobody answered him. He set the ice cream down very carefully and lowered himself into his chair. He has a port in his arm now, from the dialysis, and he keeps that arm close to his body.

Dale did not sit down. He stood behind Kathy’s chair with his hands on the back of it.

“Mom’s setting the rent,” I said.

“Mom,” Cheryl said. “You don’t have to do this right now.”

“Your brother asked me to do it in front of everybody,” Mom said. “And you brought a paper to my birthday supper. So I think now is just fine.”

She unfolded the napkin. She cleared her throat. She held it up close to her glasses and read it out loud.

“Rent on the home 160 for this year. One dollar.”

Cheryl made a sound. Not a word. Just a sound, like the air had gone out of her.

“And three Sunday drives,” Mom read. “One in May when it’s planted. One in July when it’s tall. One in October when it’s coming out.”

Then she put the napkin down and folded her hands on top of it.

“I can’t walk the fields anymore,” she said. “You all know that. I haven’t been past the windbreak since my hip.”

She smoothed the napkin with her thumb.

“Your dad and I used to drive every section line on a Sunday after Mass and look at everybody’s crops and say whose looked good and whose didn’t. I miss it. I miss seeing my own ground. That’s what I want for rent. A dollar so it’s legal and three Sunday drives so I can see it.”

The room was quiet for maybe three seconds.

Then Jim started to laugh.

It was not a mean laugh. It started low in his chest and came out of him like it had been stuck in there a long time. He put his good hand over his eyes and his shoulders shook.