The Tuesday I Walked Into Card Club

“Lance,” she said. “Take your wife home.”

Lance did not move. I could feel him standing there at my back, solid as a fence post. When he talked, his voice was quiet and very steady.

“No, Mom,” he said. “I brought her. I signed that check over to you in June, and that was my mistake, not hers. Greta’s bill is due Friday. We’re here for it.”

Joanne Lindgren was Vonda’s partner. She sat directly across from Vonda, a little bird of a woman with white hair and glasses, in a flowered blouse, sixty-five years old, same as Vonda.

She laid her cards face down on the table, all of them, neat in one stack.

“Vonda,” Joanne said quietly. “What money is this?”

“It’s nothing,” Vonda said. “It’s family business.”

“Then it’s my business,” Joanne said. “I have been your family since nineteen sixty-seven. Where is that girl’s money?”

Vonda set her own cards down. She opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened it again. Every woman in that room leaned in.

And Vonda Thorsrud, who had never in thirty years of card club let anyone see her rattled, put both her hands flat on the table.

“It’s in the bank,” she said. “Most of it. It’s in savings at Mayville, just like I said.”

“Most of it,” Joanne said.

Vonda looked at the window, not at any of us.

The light was on her face, and for the first time that I could remember, she looked every one of her sixty-five years.

“You all remember eighty-five,” she said. “Some of you lived it the same as I did. My dad borrowed against the home place west of Hatton to buy more land at the top of the market, because the bank told him to. And then the interest went up and the land went down.”

Two or three of the women nodded. Irene closed her eyes.

“They had the auction in March,” Vonda said. “I was twenty-four. I stood in the yard with my mother and watched a man from Grand Forks buy her kitchen table for eleven dollars. My mother’s kitchen table. She stood there and didn’t say a word, and that night my dad sat in the truck until morning.”

Her voice did not break. Vonda’s voice never breaks. But her hands on the table had started to shake, and she pressed them down harder to make them stop.

“I swore that nothing like that would ever happen to anybody of mine,” she said.

She looked around the tables at her friends. “Young people get money and they think it will always be there. I have watched it go. I’ve watched good farm kids lose everything in two bad years. I was keeping it safe.”

“I believe you,” I said, and I did. “I believe that’s why you took it. But why is it tied up?”

Vonda looked down. “In July, Duane’s combine engine went out,” she said. Duane is her younger brother, sixty-one, farming by Northwood.

“Right before harvest,” she went on. “The bank wouldn’t carry him on the repair. He called me crying, Robyn. My little brother, crying on the telephone.”

“How much did you lend him?” Joanne asked.

“Eleven thousand.” Vonda said it to the tablecloth. “He’ll pay it back when he sells his calves this fall. He promised. The other seventeen is right there in savings. I just could not bring myself to say it was short. Not to you. Not to Lance.”