The Farmhouse Down the Road

“Dad, does Seth pay rent?”

He didn’t look up from his cup. He put in his one spoon of sugar and stirred it, the way he has stirred every cup of coffee I have ever seen him drink.

“No,” he said. “He doesn’t.”

“But I do.”

“You do,” he said. He finally looked at me. “Seth needs it more, Darcy. You know what he’s been through.”

I did know. Seth’s wife had left the year before and taken nearly everything that wasn’t nailed down: the good truck, the savings account, the furniture, even the curtains.

She had left him a mattress on the floor and a seven-year-old boy who cried at bedtime for a month.

But my husband had left too. I had a mattress on the floor for six weeks myself. I had two kids crying at bedtime, not one.

“I’ve been through it too, Dad,” I said quietly.

“I know you have.” He set his spoon on the saucer. “But you always land on your feet. You always have. Ever since you were little. You don’t need me the way he does.”

I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence anyone has ever said to me. He did not say it to be mean. That was the worst part. He said it the way you’d say the sky was blue.

I said okay. I said it like it was nothing, and I finished my coffee, and I called the kids and buckled them in the car. I didn’t cry until I was halfway home with both of them asleep in the back seat.

Here is the thing I had to settle with myself that night, lying awake. It was Dad’s house. He had paid for it with thirty-eight years of overtime at the door plant. He had every right to set the rent at whatever he wanted.

I could not make him fair. I wasn’t going to fight my own father, and there was nothing to fight about anyway.

Nobody had broken a law. A man can charge his daughter rent and let his son live free. I could only decide where I lived.

Seth was in his driveway when I pulled in the next evening after work, unloading groceries from the old pickup he’d bought used after his ex took the good one. He saw my face and set the bags down on the tailgate.

“He told you,” Seth said.

“Ivy told me. Jack told her.” I stood there with my purse on my shoulder. “How long have you known I was paying?”

Seth looked at his boots. He is two years older than me, and bigger, and he had once carried me a mile home on his back when I broke my ankle at the creek. He could not look at me.

“I knew,” he said. “I never asked him to charge you, Darce. I swear I didn’t.”

“You never asked him not to,” I said. I didn’t say it loud. I didn’t have to. He picked up his groceries and went inside without another word, and I went inside mine.

That week I started looking. In Holmes County you don’t look on the internet first.

You look on the corkboards: the one at the hardware store in Mount Hope, the one by the door at the bulk food store, the one at the post office.

The card was at the bulk food store, pinned between an ad for a used buggy harness and a girl offering to clean houses on Thursdays. It was written in pencil, in careful square letters, on the back of a feed receipt.