The Farmhouse Down the Road

He nodded. He looked like he wanted to say something else. Then he went in and shut the door, and I drove us home on the dark country roads and pulled in across from the Hershbergers’ windows glowing with lamplight.

In January, on a Saturday morning, there was a knock on my door, and it was Seth, with Jack beside him in a snowsuit. Seth had a cup of gas station coffee in each hand. He held one out to me without a word.

I let them in. Jack ran off to find Theo, and Seth stood in my big farm kitchen and looked around at it, the wavy windows and the wide floors and the bread rising under a towel on the counter.

“This is a nice place, Darce,” he said.

“It is,” I said. “Sit down.”

He sat. He turned his coffee cup around and around on the table. Then he reached into his coat and took out a folded paper, and slid it across to me.

It was a carbon copy from his checkbook. Three checks, made out to Ned Roush. Three hundred and fifty dollars each.

“I’m paying him now,” Seth said. “Started in November. Half of what you paid, because that’s what I can do right now. I’ll get it up to seven when I can.”

I looked at the copies. November, December, January.

“He won’t cash them,” Seth said. “So I keep writing them. I put them in his mailbox so he can’t hand them back to me. He’s got three of them sitting on his counter. I counted.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

Seth looked down at his hands. “You know why he did it, don’t you? Charged you and not me?”

“Because I always land on my feet,” I said.

“That’s half of it.” Seth set the coffee down. “The other half is he’s scared I’ll start drinking again. When she left, I came close, Darce. Closer than you know. One night I sat in the truck in the parking lot of the bar out on 39 for an hour.”

I knew Seth had struggled when he was young. In his twenties it had been bad. But he’d been sober six years. He had the coin on his keychain. I didn’t know about the night in the truck.

“I didn’t go in,” he said. “I called my sponsor and I went home. But Dad found out, and after that he’d have given me anything. He was scared every day I’d lose my job, or my boy. He thought if he took the rent off me, there’d be one less reason.”

“Why didn’t he just tell me that?” I asked.

“Because he’s Dad,” Seth said. “Because he’d rather you think he’s unfair than think I’m weak.”

He looked up at me then, and his eyes were wet.

“And I let him,” Seth said. “That’s on me. I let him do it because it was easier than being the one he worried about. And you paid for it. Two years, you paid for it. I’m sorry, Darcy. I should have been the one to say something, and I wasn’t.”

I reached across the table and took his hand, the big rough hand of my big brother, who once carried me a mile home on his back. I didn’t say it was okay. It wasn’t, quite. But I held on.

“You’re saying something now,” I said.

The rest of the winter went on the way winters do out here. Snow, and then mud, and then snow again. Eli plowed my lane with a blade on the front of his team, the horses blowing steam, before I was even up.