The Tuesday I Walked Into Card Club

I married into that family when I was twenty-two. Vonda has never been unkind to me, exactly.

She has been careful with me, the way she is careful with everything, and for a long time I thought careful was simply who she was.

The landmen came in March, two of them in clean boots that had never been in a field.

A gas company was laying a line across the county, and the route ran straight across my mother’s eighty.

They wanted a fifty-foot strip for a permanent easement, plus room to work while they dug it.

The line would sit four feet down, they said, and once they put the ground back we could farm right over it, the same as before.

Lance and I sat at our kitchen table and read every page of that agreement twice. Ron read it too.

He asked about the drain tile, and he made them write down that they would keep the black dirt separate from the clay.

The company offered twenty-eight thousand dollars for the easement, with crop damages paid on top for the year they dug.

A cousin near Mayville had gotten a little less for a shorter crossing. It was fair for that ground.

“My mother would have signed it,” I said that night. “She’d have made them fix the tile first, but she’d have signed it.”

Lance nodded and picked up the pen, and I signed right under him.

We knew from the first night what the money was for. Our daughter, Greta, had been accepted into the nursing program at the university in Fargo.

She had a scholarship and some aid, but there was still a gap every semester.

We had always told her we would cover the gap so she would not start her life owing more than she had to.

Then the landmen came, and it felt like my mother had reached up out of that ground and handed us the answer.

The check came in June, in a long envelope. It was made out to Lance Thorsrud and Robyn Thorsrud, both of us, because both our names were on the deed.

A check written that way needs both signatures on the back before any bank will take it.

I signed the back of it that same night at the kitchen table, and Lance signed under me.

We meant to put it in our account at the bank in Hatton the next morning, and then to move most of it into a savings account just for Greta.

But it was planting season running late after a wet spring, and the next morning Lance was in the field by six.

He folded the check into his shirt pocket and said he would run it in when he got a chance. It stayed in that pocket for most of a week.

That Sunday, we had dinner at Vonda and Ron’s, the way we do most Sundays. Roast and mashed potatoes. Somebody mentioned the pipeline, and somebody mentioned the money.

Vonda set down her fork. “Twenty-eight thousand dollars,” she said. “Sitting loose.”

She shook her head. “You know what happens to money like that? It goes to a new pickup, or a boat, and in two years you can’t say where it went.”

“It’s for Greta’s school, Mom,” Lance said.

“Then it ought to be somewhere you can’t touch it until school.”

She looked at me when she said it, not at him. “Young couples and cash don’t mix. I have seen it. I’ve seen it more than you know.”