My name is Rosalie. I am forty-six. I run the front office at the grain elevator in a little town in Auglaize County, Ohio, about twenty minutes from St. Marys, and I have done that job for nineteen years.
If you have never worked an elevator office in harvest, it is the closest thing to air traffic control a farm town has. Trucks lined up to the road. Moisture readings. Scale tickets. I am good at it, and it is the only reason the cruise ever happened.
My parents, Sherman and Louise (everyone calls her Lou), were married in June of 1976 at the Methodist church in New Bremen, and for their fiftieth I decided they were going to have the trip they never took. They never had a honeymoon. Dad had to be back on the farm by Monday. Mom tells it like a joke, but I have seen her face when she tells it.
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So I planned it the way I plan harvest. I started a spreadsheet the fall before. I watched the prices for three months. I booked in January, when the cruise line ran a sale, for a seven-night sailing out of Port Canaveral in the second week of June, before the hurricanes and after the planting.
Three cabins. A balcony for Mom and Dad, because Mom wanted to see the ocean from her bed. A balcony for Nolan, Claire and me. And an inside cabin with two pull-down bunks for my brother Milo, his wife Christine, and their son Perry, who was fourteen.
With taxes, port fees and the prepaid tips, it came to just over $9,000. I put all of it on my card to hold the rooms, and the plan was simple. Mom and Dad’s cabin was the gift, split between Milo and me. Everybody else paid their own share by the middle of March, when the final payment came due.
Milo’s family’s share, counting their half of our parents’ room, came to $2,800.
I want you to know that when I set that number, I thought it was fair. I still think it was fair. I also know now that fair and possible are two different things, and I should have asked which one I was looking at.
Christine and I were never close, and I will own my half of that.
She married Milo when she was twenty-six and I was twenty-eight. She came from over by Celina, from a family nobody in our family really knew. Her father left when she was small. Her mother worked nights at a truck stop and raised three kids in a single-wide off a county road, and from what little Christine said about it, there were not a lot of birthday cakes.
Our family was the opposite. Big, loud, Sunday dinner, the same seats at the same table for forty years. My mother has a hallway in the farmhouse that is nothing but pictures, top to bottom, every wedding and every graduation and every new baby. You cannot walk to the bathroom without passing thirty years of us.
Christine always stood at the edge of the room at those dinners. She brought a dish and washed it herself before she left. She laughed a beat late at the old family jokes, the ones you have to have been there for. And I, God forgive me, read that as cold.
She read us as a club. I know that now. A club with a hallway full of proof.