The Straw Fort I Built for Free

The Drive Home

The kids were quiet in the back seat the whole way. That is how I knew it had landed on them too.

Tara finally said it when we turned onto our road. “Pax didn’t have to pay,” she said.

Pax is Donnie’s boy, seven years old. He is my kids’ cousin and their best friend in the world.

The three of them are a pack. They ride bikes down the ditch road and build dams in the creek.

They sleep in a pile on the living room floor every chance they get.

“Well, it’s his dad’s fort,” I said. “I guess his dad lets him in.”

“He said we could’ve snuck in the back by the silo,” Tara said. “But I told him we already paid.”

Cole was asleep against the window by then, worn out from the maze. A piece of straw was still stuck in his hair.

In the mirror I watched Tara work it over. The unfairness of it. The way a kid does when the math does not come out right and no grown-up will say so.

“That’s not very nice of Uncle Donnie,” she said. It was not a question.

She was giving me the chance to agree. Or to tell her it was fine, that was how the world worked, you pay to play.

I did not want to tell her that. I have told my kids a lot of hard true things.

I was not going to tell them that one. “No,” I said. “It’s not very nice.”

I did not have a plan yet. I want to be honest about that. I was not a woman with a clever answer already loaded.

I was just a mother driving two tired kids home. I was looking out at our own yard coming up on the left.

It was the big flat run of grass between the house and the machine shed. And the number came to me before the plan did.

Thirty. We had thirty bales of our own straw stacked in the near end of the shed.

They were put up for bedding, our hay, cut off a field we rent in our own name. It is the one piece out here that is ours by a handshake that at least nobody else was at.

Thirty bales is a lot of fort.