The Camper on the Eighty That Was Mine

“The bank called the operating note,” he said through his fingers.

“When Dad died. They want it in my name, with a new appraisal, and the numbers don’t work. Corn’s under four dollars. The hog company cut the managers’ bonus this year. Every month I’m further behind.”

I did not say anything to that. I came down and sat on the top step, a little above him, the way I used to sit with a fourth grader who had gotten a bad grade and could not tell his mother.

“Crystal’s dad lost his rental in Creston,” he said. “Her mom’s got her heart trouble. Crystal cried every night for a month. Her brothers kept calling, saying we had that big house sitting out here with one woman rattling around in it.”

He took his hands off his face and looked at the hay field, bare and short now, with the marks of the bales still pressed into the stubble.

“I told myself you had your pension,” he said. “I told myself you had somewhere to go. I didn’t know what else to do, Marlene.”

“You could have asked me,” I said quietly.

He did not answer that. I do not think he had an answer.

After a while he got up, and nodded to me without meeting my eyes, and walked back up the lane, and I watched him until he went into the yard.

Hannah

Darrin and Crystal moved their things into the house that weekend. The only one of them who came down the lane that first week was Hannah.

Hannah is Darrin and Crystal’s oldest. She is nine. She has her grandmother Ann’s dark eyebrows and her grandfather’s habit of looking at you sideways when she is deciding whether you are telling her the truth.

She came down on Wednesday after school, carrying a plate of her mother’s scotcheroos under foil.

She knocked on the camper door with her elbow, because her hands were full, and I knew before I opened it that Crystal had sent those bars. Crystal is not a bad woman. She was frightened.

“Mom says these are for you,” Hannah said, holding out the plate. “And Dad says I can stay till the yard light comes on, but not one minute after.”

So we sat at the fold-down table and ate scotcheroos and played crazy eights with Harlan’s old deck of cards.

She beat me four games out of six. I did not let her win. She is very good, and she does not believe in mercy at cards.

When she was putting her coat on to go, she stopped and looked all around the camper, at the little bed and the space heater and the jar candles from the hardware store.

“Grandma Marlene,” she said, sideways, the way she does. “Does it get cold out here at night? Tell me the truth.”

“No, honey,” I said. “It’s snug as a bug in a rug down here.”

It did get cold. That furnace ran about every ten minutes on a cold night, and I woke most mornings with a nose like an ice cube.

But I was not going to tell a nine-year-old that, and I was not going to have her carry it back up the lane to her father.