She answered on the second ring, laughing at something, with a television going behind her. “Lindsey! Hi! Are you calling about the centerpieces, because Mom changed her mind again and now she wants the mason jars…”
“Ashlyn,” I said. “I need to tell you something and I need you to let me finish.”
I told her. I did not dress it up.
I said that the deposit she and Jared had paid had been spent by the owner of the farm, that I was not going to let her lose it, that I would be writing her a check that week from my own account, and that her wedding date was safe, though I was still working out where it would be.
She did not say anything for so long that I looked at the phone to see if the call had dropped.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“Lindsey,” she said then. “Is something wrong with the barn?”
“The barn is fine. The deposit isn’t.”
“But my grandpa.” Her voice cracked clean in half. “My grandpa is eighty-eight. My dad passed when I was nine. Grandpa’s walking me down that floor. He’s been practicing in the kitchen with a broom.”
I closed my eyes. “I know, honey,” I said. “He still will.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m not going to let that man miss it.”
I called ten more. Some of them cried. A young man named Garrett Mabry, a diesel mechanic from Westby who was marrying a girl named Paige on the fourth Saturday of September, said nothing at all for so long that I thought he had put the phone down. When he spoke he said, very evenly, “Is Norbert Kowalski somebody I should go talk to?”
“No,” I said. “Please don’t. That is exactly the wrong thing.”
“He took our money.”
“He did,” I said. “And I’m giving it back to you. Please let me do that and nothing else. If you want to hold a grudge, hold it against the bank.”
There was a long breath. “Okay, Mrs. Kowalski.”
“Lindsey.”
“Okay. Lindsey.” He cleared his throat. “Paige’s going to want to know where.”
“I’ll know by Friday.”
That was the second promise.
The next morning I wrote eleven checks.
Drew came in from work while I was addressing the envelopes. He sat down across from me, picked up the pen, and started signing his name beside mine on each check without asking which one was which.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s my account.”
“It’s our account.” He did not look up. “I laid every board in that floor, Lindsey. I’m not about to let some kid in Westby stand on the floor I laid and wonder who he can trust.”
At the end of the stack he put down the pen and said, “Where do we go?”
“I’m going to ask Wilbur and Vera Engstrom,” I said.
Wilbur and Vera Engstrom farm the quarter section east of ours. Wilbur is seventy-four. Vera is seventy-one. They have been married fifty-one years and I have never once seen either of them sit down without the other one handing them something.
They had a dairy barn too. Not as pretty as Gustav’s, but bigger across the floor, with a concrete bay and a hay loft you could have held a dance in. They sold their last cows in 2016 when Wilbur’s knees quit, and it had stood empty since, full of swallows and old baler twine.