The Keys I Left on His Table

Ansel cut the cake himself, the way he cut everything, straight down the middle with the same bread knife he had used on Thanksgiving turkeys since before I met his daughter.

Twenty people were crowded into his farmhouse kitchen in Richland County, Wisconsin. It was Saturday, the first of November, and he had turned seventy-four that week.

Carla’s brother Roland had driven up from Eau Claire with his wife and their two boys. Ansel’s sister Arlene was there, and two couples from church, and a cousin I only ever saw at birthdays.

Our daughter Katie, fourteen, sat on the stool by the woodstove with a paper plate balanced on her knees. She had picked the corner piece with the most frosting, the way she had since she was four.

Ansel tapped his fork against his coffee cup. The kitchen went quiet in the way a kitchen does when the man who owns the house wants to talk.

“I’ve got some news,” he said. “Figured I’d tell everybody at once, so I only have to say it one time.”

Everybody stopped chewing.

“The back eighty is sold.”

I thought I had heard him wrong. I actually turned my head a little, the way you do when an engine makes a noise you can’t place.

“A wind outfit out of Illinois,” Ansel went on. “They want the ridge for four towers and a road for the substation. Three hundred eighty thousand dollars. We closed Thursday.”

Somebody clapped. Then somebody else did, because that is what you do at a birthday when the old man announces money.

Ansel smiled like a man who had just heard a good milk price on the radio. He looked pleased with himself, and he looked at the room, not at me.

I looked at Carla. She was already looking at me, and her hand had found my knee under the table. She held it, hard, the way you hold a dog that wants to go after something.

That morning, in the truck on the way over, she had said, “Whatever happens today, please not at my dad’s table. Please. His heart.” He’d had a stent put in that March. We had both sat in the waiting room at Gundersen for four hours.

So I sat there. And there was nothing to wave in the air anyway, no paper, no letter, no signature. There was only a handshake from a long time ago.

I want to tell you about that handshake, because everything that came after it makes more sense if you understand what it was.

It was the second of November, 2010. Carla and I had been married nine years. We were renting a duplex in town, and I was fixing combines and tractors at Hanson Implement for eighteen dollars an hour.

Ansel had asked us over for Sunday dinner. After pot roast he sent Carla and her mother to the sink, and he walked me out to the barn, and he stood in the aisle with his thumbs in his suspenders.

“I’m fifty-nine, Neal,” he said. “My knees are bad, and Roland wants nothing to do with cows. I need a man in the evenings.”

“I work till four-thirty,” I said.

“Evenings is when I need you. Feed, milk, bed them down, clean the gutter. Fix what breaks. Run the baler in July.” He looked at the cows, not at me. “Do that with me, and the back eighty goes to you and Carla. I’ll put it right when I’m gone.”