The Barn Deposits and the Engstrom Barn

Then, nineteen days before the first wedding, I asked him for the account balance, because I needed to pay the rental company for the chairs and the rental company wanted a card on file. And Norbert put down his fork.

He told me the next morning, in the milk house, that the money was gone. Not misplaced. Not borrowed. Spent, as of March, against the operating note at the Vernon County bank.

“Milk price was down to nineteen dollars in the spring,” he said. He said it like it explained everything, which to him it did. “I owe ninety thousand dollars to the bank. I sold six heifers in the fall and it wasn’t close. Something had to come in.”

“That wasn’t yours to spend,” I said.

My voice came out so quiet I was surprised by it. I have since decided that quiet is what my voice does when it is trying not to do something else.

“The barn is on my land,” Norbert said again. “Without my land there’s no barn. Without the barn there’s no deposits. I paid my note. That’s all I did.”

“Dad,” Drew said.

“I’m not losing this farm for your flowers,” Norbert said.

I asked him one question before we left. I asked it as gently as I knew how.

“Is there any of it left, Norbert? Any at all?”

“Four hundred dollars,” he said. “Maybe.”

Drew took my elbow and walked me out into the yard, where the late August light was coming flat across the stubble and a barn cat was washing itself on the lid of the feed bin. He did not say anything. He opened the truck door for me like we were going to church.

We sat in the cab with the heater running and neither of us touched the key.

You may be wondering why I did not simply call a lawyer, or the county, or the sheriff. I know three women who said exactly that, in nearly those words, before the week was out. I understand it. I thought of it too.

But every contract in that binder had Norbert’s name on it. His farm held the permit and the liability policy.

If I sued, I would be suing the only people who could legally hold the weddings, over money that was already spent, and a suit takes a year. Ashlyn Sorlie was getting married in nineteen days. A courtroom does not move at the speed of a bride.

And there was a smaller reason, one I did not say out loud until much later. Norbert was Drew’s father. Whatever I did, Drew would still have to sit across a supper table from him at Christmas. I did not want to build a thing between those two men that a judge had made.

“What do you want to do?” Drew said at last.

“I want to call every one of them,” I said. “Tonight. Before they hear it from anybody else.”

“And say what?”

“That their money is coming back. That their date is still their date.” I looked at my hands on the binder. “I don’t know about the barn yet. I know about the money.”

Drew nodded slowly.

“We don’t have it,” he said. “Not fourteen thousand.”

The first one I called was Ashlyn.