The College Fund at the Pasture Fence

What nobody at that table knew

Neil and I had been trying for six years. Not “thinking about it.” Trying, with calendars and blood draws and a fertility clinic in Columbia an hour from our house.

Four rounds of shots. I gave myself most of them in the staff bathroom at work, on my fifteen-minute break, with the door locked and the fan running.

Two losses. One at eight weeks and one at eleven.

The second one happened on a Sunday, and I drove myself to the emergency room because Neil was out on a service call for a combine that had quit in a bean field.

He came straight there the minute he got my message, still in his work shirt with grease to the elbows.

He sat by the bed and held my hand and did not say a single foolish thing. That is the kind of man he is.

My family knew some of it. Mom knew all of it. Jeff knew about the losses, because Mom told him, and he had sent me a text both times. The first one said, “Sorry sis.” The second said, “That’s rough.”

That was the whole of what my brother ever said about it. Everything else he said about it was a joke.

The fund

The other thing nobody at that table knew, except Jeff and Noreen, was the college fund.

When Hunter was three, the farm had a terrible year. Drought, corn burned up in the field, and cattle prices that made Dad sick to his stomach.

Jeff and Noreen were living in the trailer down by the pond then.

I was twenty-five, single, two years into my lab job, and I had more money than I knew what to do with, which was not much money at all.

I opened a Missouri 529 plan with Hunter’s name on it.

The account was in my name. I was the owner and Hunter was the beneficiary. I put twenty-five dollars a week into it. That was what I could spare from a starting lab tech’s pay.

Every raise I got, I bumped it up. When I got my certification as a medical laboratory scientist, it went to fifty a week. When Neil and I married, he never once asked me to cut it.

Thirteen years. By that Fourth of July, Hunter’s fund sat at just over forty-five thousand dollars.

Some of that was what I put in, and a good part of it was the market doing what it does when you leave it alone.

For all thirteen years, every time a statement came, I made a copy and dropped it in Jeff’s mailbox at the end of the farm lane.

I wanted him to see it grow. I wanted him to not worry about at least one thing.

Jeff had said, early on, “Don’t tell Hunter yet. He’ll get lazy. I’ll tell him when he’s older.” I took that at face value. I figured he had.

He had not. I found that out later, at that same pasture fence.