The Tablet I Kept for Twenty Two Years

I left for Ames in the fall of 2012, not yet eighteen. I did not know, until I left, what I had carried. My father called every Sunday and asked how my classes were, and every few weeks he would say, “I got a letter I can’t make out, bud, can you hear this?” and he would read it to me over the phone, slowly, one painful word at a time, and I would tell him. Neither of us ever said it was strange. I think he thought it was a joke between us, a way of keeping me on the line.

When my mother died, in March of 2016, I came home and sat with him in the kitchen for three days. On the third day he told me to go back to school. I said I would stay. He said, “Dane, your mother did not raise you to quit with four months to go.” I understood, then, in the middle of the grief, that he was alone with the coffee can he kept the paperwork in, sorted by color, and that nobody in the world knew the system but him and me.

I went back. I graduated. I took a job with the cooperative in Fenner so I could be thirty-one miles from him, close enough to drive over on a Sunday, far enough not to be the boy who read the mail. That is the part I am least proud of, and the part I could not have told you was true until this month. I wanted to be thirty-one miles from the boy I had been.

What Soren Left

Ingrid Quist walked into the cooperative in the spring of 2024 to ask why her father’s furnace was making a noise like a dying goose, and I followed her back to the store to look at it. I knew by the time I had my head in the furnace that I was going to marry her. It took her another year to let me say so.

Her father, Soren, was the biggest man I have ever seen in an apron. He had weighed out nails by hand since 1980, he had given credit to half the county, and he talked to me the way he talked to anyone, a few words at a time, with a pause after each one, as if he was setting the words down on a shelf. He liked my father. He told me so more than once. “That Everett, he’s a man who builds things,” he said. “Never trust a man who doesn’t.”

I did not know the store was failing.