The Singer That Came Back Home

Connie is sixty-one, with short frosted hair she gets done in Morris every six weeks, and she was wearing her purple fleece, the one she has worn to every outdoor thing for ten years.

“I know you’re mad,” she said, before I could open my mouth. “And you can be mad. But let me tell you where that hundred and fifty is going before you decide I’m the worst person in Grant County.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee I didn’t want and waited.

“Kaylee wants to dance,” she said. “She has wanted to dance since she was five years old. She practices in the kitchen. She practices in the parking lot at Cenex while Megan pumps gas.”

Kaylee is Connie’s granddaughter. She’s eleven. Her mother, my cousin Megan, has been raising her alone since Kaylee was two, when Kaylee’s dad left for the oil fields in North Dakota and stopped sending much of anything back.

Megan works the register at the grocery store in Elbow Lake and picks up weekend shifts cleaning at the motel.

She does everything right and still comes up short every month.

“The studio in Alexandria is sixty-five dollars a month,” Connie said. “That’s forty minutes each way. I drive her on Tuesdays. Megan can’t do the lessons and the gas and the car payment. So I’m doing the lessons.”

She held her coffee cup in both hands. “Mom’s money is tied up in that land until spring. I have my Social Security and my little job at the clinic. I sold that machine because I had to sell something.”

“You could have told me,” I said. “I would have bought it from you.”

“For what, Abby? A hundred and fifty dollars you don’t have either?” She looked away at the yard. “An old machine in your spare room doesn’t help anybody. Lessons help Kaylee.”

That one stung, because part of it was true. I didn’t have a spare hundred and fifty that week.

Nate and I had just put a new furnace in, and harvest money doesn’t come until the elevator settles up.

“Grandma wanted me to have it,” I said quietly.

“Grandma wanted a lot of things,” Connie said. “Grandma also wanted Kaylee’s dad to come home. We don’t always get what Grandma wanted.” Then her face crumpled a little and she said, “I’m sorry. That was ugly.”

She walked back down the steps to the tables before I could say anything else. I stood on the porch with my cold coffee, and the man in the seed cap was long gone.

Sunday afternoon after church we all came back to take down tables.

The sale company had boxed up what didn’t sell for the thrift store in Fergus Falls, and the yard looked like a party after everybody went home.

On the gate by the driveway there was a clipboard.

The sale company had people sign in when they arrived on Saturday morning, because the line had started at seven and they handed out numbers to keep it fair.

I don’t know why I picked it up. I think I just wanted to see who had been there, all the neighbors who came to touch Grandma’s things one last time.

Halfway down the second page, number sixty-two, I found a name written in square farmer’s capitals with a carpenter’s pencil: Merle Haugen, Herman. No phone number, just the town.

I remembered him then, coming up the drive early with the first wave. Gray hair, seed cap, a slow walk.