The Shed We Raised Ourselves

“Glenda,” she said when I came out. “I owe you an apology I can’t make. I didn’t know. I want you to hear that.”

“I believe you, Sylvia.” “I am so ashamed.” “You didn’t do it.” “I married it,” she said, and then she did cry, a little, standing in my yard with the wind blowing her hair.

I took her inside. I gave her tea at the kitchen table. Russ came in on the walker and sat across from her, and he did not say a hard word to her, because none of it was hers.

She had a plan. She had thought about it all weekend.

“I called the dealership yesterday,” she said. “The boat is in both our names, since I cosigned the loan for the balance without reading it. I’m taking it back this afternoon. They will charge a restocking fee and the docking, and they’ll keep some of the deposit, and I’ll get back about sixty-six hundred.”

She laid a legal pad on the table. On it, in careful teacher printing, was a list. The lumber yard in Neligh. The steel supplier in Norfolk. The fuel account. The county tax on his shop, which was three months behind.

“That goes to them first,” she said. “All of it. I’m going to pay his suppliers myself and put the business on a budget I keep. And whatever he owes you and Russ comes out of his pay, four hundred a month, on the first.

I will write the check. I will bring it to your door if I have to.” “Sylvia,” Russ said, “you don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do.” She looked at him, very straight. “Your father would want it, and so do I.” She took the boat back that afternoon.

I heard from Delbert, who heard from the man at the Co-op, who had it from the dealership’s lot attendant, that Garth stood in the parking lot in Norfolk with his hands hanging at his sides and watched her sign the paper.

He did not say a word. The dealer’s man backed the trailer away down the lot, and the white boat shone one last time in the sun and then turned the corner.

By Thursday the whole county knew. Not because anyone gossiped, though I suppose some did. Simply because in a town this size, a man cannot return an eleven thousand dollar boat in the middle of the week without somebody noticing.

The lumber yard in Neligh kept his account on cash only. A man in Elgin who had been waiting on a garage quietly said he would wait on somebody else.

Garth had not been in church the Sunday before, the first one he had missed in eleven years.

I have not spoken to him since that day in my driveway, and he has not asked to speak to me. Sylvia says the first check, four hundred dollars, will come to our door on the first of December. I like her. I think I always will.

Garth has driven past our place twice since Tuesday, in his pickup with nothing behind it. He slows a little at the edge of our drive. I saw him from the kitchen window. He looked at the shed for a few seconds, the new tin bright in the cold, and then he went on.