The Deer Lease My Cousin Signed Over

Why I did not

I will tell you why I did not, because I know what some of you are thinking, and I thought it too.

The first reason is plain. Rick is my mother’s sister’s boy. Aunt Verna is ninety-one, in the home in Hugo, and she still asks every Sunday if I have been eating. There are nine first cousins on that side and a Thanksgiving table that has not had an empty chair since 1979.

If I handed that card across the street, Rick would be in a courtroom by spring, and every chair at that table would be arguing about it for the rest of my life.

The second reason is the money.

A case takes a year, and then a year more. The property taxes were due on the thirty-first of December, and I had eleven hundred dollars in checking and a certificate at the bank I had promised Walt I would never touch.

The third reason I did not say to Lavern, because I did not have the words yet. It was the club.

Eighteen men had believed one sentence about me. Widow selling. They believed it because it came in pencil on a co-op card from a man who had hunted that camp for twenty-eight years and handled everybody’s paperwork.

And not one of them had picked up a phone and asked me.

If I called Curtis and said, “Rick is lying to you,” I would be handing eighteen men a question: which of us do you believe? And I know men. Handed that question over a telephone, they pick the paperwork, and then they go quiet and stay quiet, because nobody wants to be the first to say out loud that he was fooled.

I did not want them told. I wanted them to see.

And under all of it was a thing I am a little ashamed of.

I wanted to know what thirty years had bought. Not the money. The thirty years. Whether a pot of chili every November and a woman who said “What about the deer?” in a kitchen in 1995 was worth anything to anybody once the man who stood in my yard was gone.

“What is it you want, Delia?” Lavern asked.

“I want to find out who stands up,” I said.

He studied me a good while. Then he put the card in his shirt pocket and patted it. “Then I expect I’ll be somewhere nearby.”

Ten days

I went to see Rick on Tuesday, in my good coat. I did not go to trap him. I went to give him a chance, because everybody ought to get one.

His office is two rooms above the square, with a window on the courthouse and a framed photograph on the desk of Rick and his wife Jolene and their two kids at the Gulf in 2019, all four of them sunburned and squinting and happy. He came around the desk with his arms open, and I let him hug me.

I took the property tax statement out of my purse and laid it on his blotter, facing him. Sixteen hundred and forty dollars, due December thirty-first.

“I’m a little short this year,” I said. “The lease usually covers it.”

I watched his face. I have watched that face since he was in a high chair, and I know every weather it has.

Something went through it fast, like a man hearing a footstep in a dark house, and then he put the smile back on.

“Oh, that. Dee, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. There’s some paperwork to get straight with the estate. The club check is, well, it’s in process.

And Pam said at the funeral you might sell, you know she did. I just wanted to protect it till you decide.”

That was true as far as it went.

Pam had said it. That is how he built the lie, I learned later. He took a true scrap of what my daughter said out by the cars and sewed around it so tight a man could not find the seam.

“I’ll look into it,” Rick said. “Give me a few days.”

His hands were shaking on the blotter. He saw me notice and put them in his lap.

“The club has its supper on the twentieth,” I said, buttoning my coat. “The Friday before opening. I expect I’ll see you there.”

“Sure, Dee. I’ll bring the ice.”

I gave him ten days to say something true. I did not tell Pam, because Pam would have been in her car within the hour, and I did not want a rescue.

Lavern phoned on Thursday to say he had put the card in a safe place, and that was all he said.

Rick did not call.