The Rent I Charged His Daughter

The Locks

I should tell you who I was before I said it, because it explains the sentence and does not excuse it.

I was born Lenora Haas on a wheat farm north of Ellory in January of 1960, the third of five girls. I married Vernon Kasch when I was twenty-two. He was a widower with a six-year-old boy named Rick and two hundred acres on the Smoky Hill road that had been in his family since 1911.

I was Rick’s mother for thirty-seven years. I say that plainly because it is true in every way but the one that matters to a courthouse. I taught him to tie his shoes. I sat up with him through a broken arm and two bad girlfriends. He called me Mom. He put it on the Mother’s Day cards in his own handwriting.

Vern got sick in 2015, the colon and then the liver. I nursed him at home for three and a half years, because he asked me to, and I cut my hours at the treasurer’s counter to do it. We spent thirty-eight thousand dollars of our savings on drugs insurance would not cover.

Here is what I did not understand until it was too late. In 2009, on advice from a man in Salina who sold estate plans out of a hotel conference room, Vern had signed the farmhouse and the land over to Rick, to protect it from the nursing home. Rick was going to keep it for us. Nobody wrote that last sentence down.

Vern died on the second of February, 2019. We buried him on the eighth, in sleet. Nine days later I drove home from the treasurer’s office and my key would not turn.

There was a note taped inside the screen door in Rick’s handwriting. Mom, I’m sorry. It’s mine on paper, and Carla and I need to sell. Carla had been pushing him for a year, and Rick, who never could tell her no, let her. I read it three times on that porch with a bag of groceries in my arm. He had not even waited for the headstone.

I knew I could have gone to the sheriff, and I was too ashamed. I did not make it hard. I put two suitcases in the back of the Buick and slept in the church parking lot for two weeks under a quilt, and went to work every morning with my hair up. I told nobody. Marjorie Heide found me on a Sunday, came to the Buick’s window with her hymnal, and said, “Lenora Kasch, you get out of that car this minute.” By Wednesday the church circle had found me a room.