The Farmhouse Down the Road

I told her the truth. In town, they had walked to a neighbor lady who kept them until I got home, for a hundred dollars a week. Out here I didn’t know yet. I hadn’t figured that part out.

“They can come to me,” Mary said. “I have six of my own. Two more is nothing. They will eat bread and do chores and stay out of the creek.”

I started to say I couldn’t let her do that for free, and she held up one hand.

“Not free,” she said. “You have a car. I have a doctor in Millersburg, and the store, and my sister in Charm. A driver costs me forty dollars every time I go to town. You drive me, I keep your children. That is fair.”

She said it the way Dad had said “Seth needs it more,” like it was a plain fact about the weather. Except this plain fact was kind. I had to turn around and pretend to measure the window so she wouldn’t see my face.

“That’s fair,” I said, when I could. “That’s more than fair.”

I gave Dad my notice in writing at the end of September. Thirty days, the way it’s done.

I handed it to him at Sunday dinner, folded once, and he read it at the kitchen table with his reading glasses pushed down on his nose.

He read it twice. Then he took his glasses off and set them on the table.

“An Amish house,” he said. “Out in the country. With the kids. In the winter.”

“With the kids,” I said. “It has a furnace, Dad. It has electric. It has a school bus that stops at the end of the lane.”

“And who watches them after school out there? Who’s going to plow you out?” He was getting red in the neck, the way he does. “Darcy, this is foolish. You’ve got a perfectly good house.”

“I’ve got a perfectly good house that costs me seven hundred dollars,” I said, “next to a perfectly good house that costs Seth nothing. I’m not asking you to charge Seth. I’m not asking you for anything. I’m just not going to pay it anymore.”

He looked at me like I had slapped him. I hadn’t raised my voice. I hadn’t even said anything unkind.

I had just said the true thing out loud, at his table, and I think that was worse for him than yelling would have been.

“Seth needs that house,” he said again, but quieter.

“Then he can keep it,” I said. “I hope he does. I mean that.”

I did mean it. That was the strange part. I wasn’t angry at Seth for having it. I was tired of being the one who could always be counted on to pay for being the strong one.

We moved on a Saturday in the middle of October. Seth showed up at seven in the morning without being asked and carried my dresser and my washer out to the borrowed trailer with Eli’s son Levi, who had ridden into town with an English neighbor and his truck.

Seth didn’t say much. At one point, setting down the washer, he said, “You don’t have to do this,” and I said, “I know,” and that was all. But he stayed until the last box was out.

The big things went first, in the trailer. The last load was my little sedan, packed to the roof with boxes and bedding and lamps, the trunk too full to close.