“I signed it too,” I said. “I could’ve driven to Mayville in June. I didn’t. I didn’t want to be the daughter-in-law who made trouble over money. So I’m sorry too.”
He reached over and took my hand. His hand was rough and hot from the steering wheel, and there was grain dust in every crease of it.
We sat there a while in the truck with the windows down, listening to the wind move through the soybeans, still green.
Then he dropped me in our yard and went straight back to the field.
Ron had been running alone for an hour and a half, and wheat does not wait for anybody’s family.
On Friday morning, I walked out to the mailbox at seven.
There was a plain white envelope with no stamp, just my name across the front in Vonda’s square, careful bookkeeper’s handwriting. She had driven it down herself.
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Inside was a cashier’s check from the bank in Mayville, made out to the university, for six thousand one hundred and forty dollars exactly.
Folded around it was a single sheet off her yellow legal pad.
“For Greta’s school,” it said. “The rest by Christmas. I should have done it Sunday. V.”
That was all. No apology longer than that. But Vonda Thorsrud does not write long notes, and I knew what it cost her to write the word should.
I stood out there by the mailbox and read it three times.
Greta and I drove to Fargo that afternoon. We had planned to move her into the dorm on Saturday anyway.
We loaded the car with her laundry basket and her new blue scrubs and went down Interstate 29.
At the student accounts window, Greta slid the cashier’s check under the glass herself.
The woman stamped the bill paid and slid it back. Greta stood there holding that piece of paper like it was a diploma.
“Grandma did this?” she asked me in the parking lot.
“Grandma did this,” I said. That was true, and it was the only part of it Greta needed.
She did not need to know about card club. Some things you carry so your kids don’t have to.
Vonda did not go to card club the next Tuesday, and she did not host it either. Joanne called me Wednesday night.
She said they had moved the tables to her house in town, and Vonda had called her that morning and said she had a cold.
“She doesn’t have a cold,” Joanne said. “She’s ashamed. Thirty years she’s sat at that table and never once let any of us see her short. Now she thinks we all think less of her.”
“Do you?” I asked.
Joanne was quiet a moment. “I think more of her,” she said.
She sighed into the phone. “Nearly sixty years, and she never told me about her mother’s table. You go see her, Robyn. You go see her before she talks herself into staying home forever.”
The next Monday, after I finished my afternoon route, I made a pan of bars.
I made the oatmeal caramel kind, the kind Doris always brings, because I knew it was Vonda’s favorite even if she would never say so.
I drove them up the gravel and knocked on the back door, which I had never once done in twenty years.
Vonda opened it in her apron. She looked at the pan, and then at me, and she stepped back to let me in without a word.
We sat at her kitchen table, the one Ron built for her the year they were married. She poured coffee. Neither of us touched a bar for a long time.