The House I Bought Then Reclaimed

My son’s text came in while I was standing in the cereal aisle of the IGA in Macon, my cart half full for a Thanksgiving I had already spent four days planning. “Mom, I know you bought us the house, but Ivalou’s dad says it would be better if you sat this one out. Ivalou agrees. We’ll do something with you another time.”

I read it twice. Then I set my phone face down on a box of stuffing mix and stood there long enough that a woman I have known since Sunday school asked if I was feeling all right.

I told her I was fine. I was not fine. I was doing arithmetic in my head, the kind that does not show up on a calculator: two hundred and forty five thousand dollars, six years of clipped coupons and a car I had nursed past two hundred thousand miles, against one text message from a man I had raised alone since he was nine years old.

I typed back one word. “Okay.” Then I left my cart sitting in the aisle, drove the twenty minutes back to Bevier, and did not cry once the whole way home.

My name is Iven Farnsworth. I am sixty three years old, and until three years ago I was the front office secretary at the Bevier school, the one who called your mother when you had a fever and kept a drawer of granola bars for kids whose backpacks came up empty. I have lived in Macon County my whole life. My husband worked the co-op grain elevator until his heart gave out on a Tuesday morning eight years ago, and after that it was just me and Jethro, and whatever I could stretch a school secretary’s salary into covering.