“What did you find?” She put down the pin and wiped her hands on a towel and went to the end of the table. She opened the green book to a page near the front, a page in my father’s square carpenter’s handwriting, soft with age.
“Nineteen ninety-four,” she said. “The year your father’s back went out. Ground rent. Haugen, Bernard. North forty, sixty dollars an acre. Paid in full.”
“Bernard was Marlin’s dad.”
“Your father shook his hand in that same shop. They never had a paper between them.” She traced the line with her finger. “I thought that was how it was done. A handshake and a good name.”
“It was, Mom. It still is, with good people.”
“Roy always said Alford was the smart one in the family.” She said it very quietly. “The one who got the education. Roy used to say, ‘Alford will look after you, Arlis, if anything happens.’ He said it more than once.”
I did not answer. There was nothing to answer. “I want you to know I’m not going to be bitter about this,” my mother said. “I have decided that already.”
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“You can be a little bitter, Mom.”
“No,” she said. “I can be done. That is better.” We finished the pie. Marlin called me the last week of February.
“He’s back,” he said. “He came in the shop Friday for a part for his lawn tractor. He looked me right in the eye and bought a belt.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not a word about the lease. He asked if I was ready for planting.” Marlin’s voice was rough. “I told him noon on March first, here at the shop. I told him Arlis would be here, and if he had something to say to her, that was his hour.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said, ‘Well, Marlin, I’ll see what my calendar allows.'” I closed my eyes. On the morning of March first, Mom was dressed and waiting in her kitchen chair at nine o’clock, though we did not need to leave until eleven thirty.
She wore her good navy coat, the wool one she bought for Dad’s funeral and had worn only to church since. She had her purse in her lap, and in the purse, the roof estimate from the man in Marshall, and the green ledger wrapped in a dish towel.
“Why the ledger?” I asked.
“Because it is my handwriting,” she said. “I want it with me.” The morning was clear and cold.
We drove past her back forty, the one with the combine. Mom turned her head to watch it go by, the long brown stripe of ground with the black earth showing through the old stalks.
“Your father plowed that with a Farmall in nineteen seventy-six,” she said. “I rode on the fender. I was seven months along with your sister.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I wonder if he would have known it,” she said. “If Roy walked down that row today.”
“He would know it.” She nodded and folded her hands, and we turned up the Haugen lane. The big shop door was rolled up to let in the sun.
Marlin stood just inside, with his seed cap in his hands, which I had never seen him do. Verlene stood beside him, a small round woman in a flannel shirt, with a coffee pot already poured and a chipped mug waiting.