“It’s tied up, Robyn.” That was all Vonda said at first, and she said it the way you would tell somebody the post office had already closed for the day.
I was standing at my kitchen counter on a Sunday night in August with the tuition bill in one hand and the phone in the other.
The bill had been on the counter since Thursday, held down by the salt shaker.
“Tied up how?” I asked. I kept my voice even.
I have driven a school bus on the gravel roads of Traill County for eleven years, and you learn to keep your voice level with forty kids behind you.
“In the bank. Where it’s safe. Where it’s supposed to be.”
I heard her set something down on her end, a coffee cup most likely. “I don’t see why we have to talk about this on a Sunday night.”
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“Because it’s due Friday,” I said. “Greta’s fall bill. Six thousand one hundred and forty dollars.”
I read the number off the paper even though I knew it by heart. “That’s what the money was for, Vonda. You said so yourself, at your own table.”
“I said I would keep it safe until you needed it. And I’m telling you it’s tied up right now.”
There was a pause, and then her voice went flat and cool. “Don’t take that tone with me, Robyn. I don’t deserve that tone.”
Then she said she still had Ron’s lunch to pack for the morning, and she hung up before I could say another word. I stood there holding a dead phone.
Out the window over the sink, the wheat on the east quarter stood gold and dry in the last of the light.
I could hear Lance’s combine still running out past the shelterbelt, trying to get one more round in before the dew came down.
I did not cry. Later I cried plenty. That night I just stood there and thought about my mother.
The money came from my mother’s land. It was not Thorsrud money. It came out of the dirt I grew up on.
My folks farmed eighty acres of good black Red River Valley ground two miles south of Hatton.
My father worked it until his back gave out, and after he passed, my mother rented it to a neighbor and kept the house and the yard and her garden.
In the winter of 2019, the winter before she died, Mom had the eighty deeded over to Lance and me.
She drove herself to Hillsboro in her church coat to sign the papers.
“You two will take care of it,” she told us afterward at her kitchen table.
She pushed the copies across the oilcloth with one finger. “That’s all I want from you. Don’t let it go for nothing, and don’t let it come between anybody.”
She put both our names on it on purpose. She loved Lance like he was her own boy.
He had shoveled her walk every winter for fifteen years without being asked, and she never forgot a single one of those mornings.
Lance farms with his dad, Ron, on the Thorsrud place a mile and a half north of us up the gravel.
After Mom passed, they took her eighty into their own rotation, wheat one year and soybeans the next, and the rent check stopped and the crop came in instead.
Lance’s mother, Vonda, has kept the books for the Thorsrud farm for forty-five years at the rolltop desk in her dining room.