The Swim Lessons I Paid For First

Two years before

I should explain how it happened in the first place, because I have asked myself a hundred times how I let it, and the honest answer is not flattering to me.

Alden died on a Tuesday in late April. He managed the field work at a dairy east of Zeeland, a big outfit with about four hundred cows and more corn ground than any one man could keep up with in spring.

He had worked there since he was nineteen.

He was cutting a ditch bank with an older tractor, one without a cab, because the newer one was in the shop. The bank was soft from rain.

The tractor rolled. The owner found him an hour later when he didn’t come in for dinner, and by then it did not matter how fast anyone drove.

He was 35. Tucker was seven and Abe was five. I was 32 and a part-time librarian at the elementary school, where I checked out books three mornings a week and spent most of my pay on the boys’ after-school care.

I don’t remember much of May that year. I remember the casseroles stacked in the refrigerator so tight the door wouldn’t close. I remember the pastor sitting at my kitchen table holding my hand.

I remember that I could not sign my own name straight on anything. My hand shook so badly the funeral director had to steady the clipboard.

Darlis came every day. I have to say that, because it’s true, and because it matters to the rest of this. She came every single day for six weeks.

She folded laundry. She drove the boys to school. She sat in the bleachers at Tucker’s T-ball games when I couldn’t make myself go.

And she said, early on, that she would handle the paperwork. The life insurance from the dairy, the death certificates, the forms from the county, the call to Social Security about survivor benefits for the boys.

She said I shouldn’t have to deal with any of it. She said she’d done it all once already, for Alden’s father.

I let her. I signed what she put in front of me. When the woman from Social Security called the house to ask about the boys’ benefits, Darlis was the one who talked to her, and when Darlis said she would be the payee, at least for now, at least until I was back on my feet, I said yes.

I meant it. I was grateful. I want that on the record, because I spent a long time afterward being angry at her and I don’t want to pretend I wasn’t part of it.

The survivor checks came to about nine hundred a month for each boy. Eighteen hundred together. I didn’t know that number for the first year.

I knew only the envelope Darlis handed me in the church parking lot every first Sunday, six crisp hundred-dollar bills inside, and her voice saying, “For the boys.”