The Ground Uncle Rented for Ninety

“Mom.”

“I’m not saying it makes it right. I’m saying that’s what I saw.” Marlin handed me the check. Thirty-one thousand two hundred dollars, written out to my mother, in Verlene’s neat hand.

“You hold on to that for her till you get her to the bank,” he said. “I don’t want her carrying that kind of money in a purse.”

“Thank you, Marlin.” By April, half the men at the co-op coffee table in Slater knew the whole of it.

No one in our family told them. Marlin did not tell them, and neither did Burl Coover. But a farm town is a small place, and ninety dollars an acre is a number that gets said out loud once and then travels.

Three of Alford’s farm insurance clients moved their policies to the agent in Sedalia before the end of the month.

The next summer, Alford sold the lot in Yuma. I heard it from Ruthann’s sister, who is in my church group, and who said Ruthann had not spoken much since the winter. That money had been paying for more than the trailer.

He never apologized to my mother. He never came to the house again.

I want to be honest and tell you that part of me wanted him to. I wanted him to knock on the screen door with a pie in his hands and a thing he could not say. I would have stood in the kitchen and listened.

He did not come. My mother says that is his to carry. She prays for him every night by name, still, at the end of her list. I have heard her do it through the wall.

“I forgave him in the shop,” she told me, once. “It took one breath, and it didn’t cost me anything. It’s the not-trusting that takes the work.”

The roofers came in the second week of April. A crew of four in a white truck, with a long ladder and a radio playing country.

Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars, paid out of the first Haugen check, and Mom kept the receipt in the green ledger.

It rained the night they finished. I stayed over at the farmhouse, in my old room at the front. About two in the morning I woke to the sound of a steady rain on the new roof, a clean, flat, ordinary sound.

I walked down the hallway in my socks. Mom’s light was on. She was sitting up in bed in her flannel gown with her reading glasses on, and the back bedroom door was standing open across the hall.

The aluminum bucket was on the floor in there, bone dry, upside down, just as Mom had turned it over that morning.

“Listen,” she said, when she saw me. We listened.

“Not a drop,” my mother said. She patted the bedspread beside her, and I sat down, and we listened to the rain for a long time without saying anything at all.

The next year, on the first of November, a card came from Verlene Haugen that said only, Thank you for the coffee, Arlis. We use your mug every day.

Mom put it under the ceramic rooster by the salt shaker. She made ham and beans. And I did not stir them. I sat in the chair by the window, in the light, and I let my mother stand at her own stove.