The Ground Uncle Rented for Ninety

“Not tomorrow.” I had been turning it over in the truck the whole drive. I did not want a quiet fix. A quiet fix is how this had stayed hidden for nine years.

“Give me until March first,” I said.

“Why March?”

“Because that is when the lease year turns over, and when your next payment is due. And because I want my mother to read every one of those checks with her own eyes, at her own table, before anybody says Alford’s name out loud.”

Marlin rubbed his mustache. “And I want you to give Alford a chance first,” I said. He looked up. That surprised him, I think. It surprised me, a little.

“A chance to do what?”

“To tell her himself. Walk in her kitchen and say it. Tell him you’re paying Arlis direct starting March first, and that he has until then to explain it to her in his own words. If he does, then you and I will sit down with him and see what can be done.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then she signs your lease, and he can watch.” Marlin thought about it.

“That’s fairer than he deserves,” he said.

“It is what my mother would say to do.” He nodded once. “Then I’ll tell him tonight.” I drove home with Verlene’s photocopies on the passenger seat of my pickup, and I did not cry until I got to the Casey’s in Slater and pulled into the lot.

I am not a woman who cries in a parking lot. But I thought about my father. Roy Brockman farmed that ground for forty-one years. He taught me to drive on the section road behind it, in a green Ford with a bench seat and a clutch that took two feet to push down.

He would sit beside me with his arm out the window and say, “Easy. Easy. Let her pull.” He died on a March morning, between the barn and the house, with a coffee can of nails in one hand. Mom found him.

Alford showed up at the farmhouse within the hour, hat in his hands, and he held her at that very kitchen table while she shook.

“Don’t you worry about the ground, Arlis,” he said, three days later, over the casseroles. “I’ll see it’s taken care of. You just grieve.”

I was thirty-five years old, standing in that kitchen with a dish towel. I was grateful to him. I remember being grateful.

Nine years, I thought, with my forehead on the steering wheel. Nine years of Christmas hams from Alford. Nine years of Alford at the head of the table saying grace.

Nine years of her thanking him. Marlin called me that night at ten o’clock.

“I told him,” he said. “I called him at the house. Ruthann answered, and then he got on.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Now Marlin, let’s not do anything hasty.’ He said he and Arlis had an understanding, and that he had done a lot for that woman over the years.” Marlin paused. “I told him what you said. I told him he had until March first to tell her himself.”

“And?”

“He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, ‘I did the work of finding you, Marlin. Somebody had to find a tenant.’ Like it was a fee. Like I owed him a finder’s fee for nine years.”