Two Cokes and a Fish Fry Menu

Grandma’s Forty Acres

To understand why that money mattered, you have to understand my grandmother, Florence Duda, who everyone in three counties has called Flossie since the Eisenhower administration.

She was eighty-six that winter. She still drove herself to the grocery store in daylight, still played sheepshead every Tuesday at the Legion with three men who were afraid of her, and still set her hair in pin curls every Friday morning whether she was going anywhere or not.

My grandpa Walter had died six years before. He left her the little house in town and forty acres of hunting land north of the river, mostly popple and swamp, with a deer stand he had built himself the year I was born.

For years people asked to buy that land, and for years she told them no.

Then last spring she called me on a Sunday afternoon and said, “I sold it. Don’t argue. Come over, I made kolaches.”

When I got there she had a cashier’s check on the kitchen table under the sugar bowl, made out to both of us, Russ Kowalczyk and Shari Kowalczyk. Forty-three thousand dollars, the most money I had ever seen with my own name on it.

“Grandma, no,” I said. “That’s your money. That’s Grandpa’s land.”

“It’s Grandpa’s land that turned into money,” she said, and pushed the plate of kolaches at me. “He’d rather see it turn into a house than sit in a swamp. And I’d rather see it now than have you get it after the funeral and cry on it.”

“You can’t just give us forty-three thousand dollars.”

“I can, and I did. The man at the bank says I file a paper and owe no tax on it at all, so don’t you start with me about taxes.” She tapped the check with one finger. “For a house, Shari. Not for that duplex where the landlord never shovels the walk.”

Russ was there too. He stood in her little kitchen with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes wet, and when she hugged him he held on longer than I had ever seen him hold on to anybody.

“Thank you, Flossie,” he said into her shoulder. “We’ll do right by it. I promise you.”

We put it in the savings account at the mill credit union, where Russ’s paycheck went and where we had always banked. I remember thinking it was safe there. Safer than anything else in our lives.

The Kitchen Table

I sat in the truck in the credit union lot until my fingers went numb, and then I drove home to the duplex and waited for Russ to get back from first shift.

He came in at a quarter to four, stamping snow off his boots on the rug, smelling like the mill smells, that warm, wet, sour pulp smell that gets into a man’s clothes and never fully washes out.

I had the five sheets of paper unfolded on the kitchen table. I didn’t say anything. I just watched his face when he saw them.

He knew what they were from across the room. I saw it hit him. He stood with one boot off and one boot on, and his whole body went still, the way a deer goes still in a field before it decides which way to run.

He didn’t run. I’ll give him that, and I gave it to him even that day. He took off the other boot, hung up his coat, came to the table, and sat down across from me with his big hands flat on the oilcloth.

“I was going to tell you,” he said.

“When?”

“When it was back.” He swallowed. “I was going to put it back before you ever knew it was gone, Shar. That was the whole idea.”

“Russ.” I had to stop and breathe. “That was Grandma’s land. That was our house. We found the house. I went for the earnest money today.”

His face crumpled. I had been married to that man for eighteen years, and I had seen him cry twice: at his father’s funeral and when our dog Rusty died. This was the third time.

“Tell me,” I said. “All of it. Don’t leave anything out, because I’ll find it, and then it’ll be worse.”

So he told me.