The Girl Who Paid the Rent in Quarters

The padlock was brand new. That is the first thing I noticed, standing in the barn lot in my work shoes with the sun already hot on the back of my neck. It still had the price sticker on the bottom.

Noelle was standing at the barn door with an empty milk pail in one hand and the other hand flat against the boards, like she could feel the goats through the wood. She did not turn around when my car pulled in.

Inside, I could hear Clover. Clover is the loud one. She was hollering the way a Nubian hollers when her bag is full and nobody has come, a long, offended bleat that sounds almost like a person complaining.

“Mom,” Noelle said. “He locked them in.”

She was eleven. She had her hair in the braid she wore every day of summer so it would stay out of the milk, and she had on her white 4-H shirt because she had planned to practice setting up her goats for the show.

The county fair started in two days. Her goats were checking in Thursday. Her class was Friday morning.

Taped to the hasp, folded in half, was a note on a sheet torn from a feed store receipt book. It said, in square capital letters that I will not copy here because they still make my stomach tighten: rent short two hundred ten dollars, barn stays locked until paid in full.

It was signed R. Hiltner.

The rent, and the man who owned the lock

I want to be fair about the rent, because a story like this is easy to tell crooked.

We rented the old farmhouse on Russ Hiltner’s place outside Wooster for $850 a month. It came with the house, the yard, a garden spot, and the use of the little bank barn behind it. We had lived there four years. We had never once been late until that summer.

In June my husband had surgery on two discs in his lower back. He had been a mechanic at the same implement dealer for nineteen years, and he had worked through the pain for two of them until one morning he could not get out of the truck.

The surgery went fine. The recovery was slow, the way the surgeon said it would be. He was not allowed to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk for three months. He was not allowed to drive. He spent most of July flat on the couch with a pillow under his knees, hating every minute.

His short-term disability paid sixty percent of his check, and it paid late. I picked up every shift the agency would give me. I am a home health aide. I drive to people’s houses and help them bathe and eat and take their pills. It is good work, and it does not pay much.

On the first of August I paid Russ $640. I told him, standing on the porch, that the other $210 would come on the fifteenth when my next check cleared. He nodded and put the money in his shirt pocket and said, “See that it does.”

I thought that was the end of it until the fifteenth. I was wrong.