The College Fund at the Pasture Fence

The first weeks

Brody’s first week, he asked me if he would have to give the sneakers back when he left. I was standing in the yard hanging up his jeans.

“Those are yours, honey,” I said. “Whatever happens, those go where you go.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “Okay,” and went back to throwing a tennis ball against the side of the shed, over and over, until it was too dark to see.

The second week, he asked Neil if foster kids were allowed to play baseball. Neil was under the hood of my car in the driveway, changing a serpentine belt.

Neil slid out and wiped his hands on a red shop rag. “Who told you they weren’t?”

“Nobody,” Brody said. “I just never got to.”

Neil looked at me across the hood. That Saturday he went to the implement dealer where he works, dug through the scrap pile, and came home with some old electrical conduit and a roll of heavy netting.

He built a pitchback net in the side yard in one afternoon. He bent the conduit with a hand bender, bolted the corners, and stretched the netting tight with bungee cords so the ball would come right back.

Brody stood and watched him the whole time with his hands in his pockets. When it was done, Neil handed him a ball and said, “Twenty throws a night. That’s the deal.”

Brody threw two hundred that night. We had to call him in for supper twice.

The fence line

It was one evening in late September that I sat down and did the math.

I did it outside, on the tailgate of Neil’s truck at the edge of the hayfield behind our house, with my phone and a legal pad.

Brody’s case plan said long-term. Karen had told us honestly that nobody could promise more than that. His mother was not well, and there was no other family that had stepped forward.

Whatever happened, this boy was going to grow up with nothing in his name. Not a savings account. Not a dollar.

I knew how the numbers ran for kids who age out of foster care. I had read them in training.

And I had forty-five thousand dollars sitting in an account with my name on it, for a boy who already had a father, a mother, a farm, and a grandmother who would sell her car for him.

I want to be fair to Hunter. He is a good kid. He works hard on that farm. He was going to be fine.

I read the plan rules twice. A 529 owner can change the beneficiary, but only to a member of the beneficiary’s own family. A sibling, a cousin, a parent. Brody was not Hunter’s family. Not on paper. The lady at the bank said there were ways around that, a couple of beneficiary changes and some waiting. I did not want a workaround. I wanted a clean break.