The Voicemail Nine Days After I Left

“You’ve been a burden on this outfit since the day you came home.”

My father said it with his fork still in his hand. He did not raise his voice. He said it the way he would tell you a heifer was open, like it was a plain fact about livestock and somebody ought to do something about it.

I had a bowl of mashed potatoes in my hands. I was passing it to Dale, our hired man, who ate supper with us four nights a week and had for twenty years.

Dale took the bowl and looked down into it.

All I had asked was one thing. I had asked if the ranch could pay me four hundred dollars a month, so I could take two online classes and finish the accounting degree I had walked away from when Mom got sick.

Four hundred dollars. I had the number written on a sticky note in my back pocket, because I knew I would lose my nerve if I didn’t.

“Dad,” I said. “I do the books. I do the house. I do your pills.”

“And you eat here and you sleep here and your insurance comes out of the ranch account.” He cut his roast. “I’d say you’re paid.”

My brother Jake reached across me for the gravy. He was thirty-one years old and he had never once in his life rinsed a plate.

“Honestly, Abby,” he said, not even looking up, “if you left tomorrow, nobody’d miss you. We’d get by fine.”

He said it lightly. That was the part that stayed with me. He was not angry. He was just saying what he thought was true, the way you would mention the weather.

I waited for my father to correct him.

The kitchen clock ticked. It was the rooster clock my mother bought at a craft fair in Ainsworth, the one I changed the battery in every fall when the time changed.

My father salted his potatoes.

Dale set down his fork. “Gary,” he said quietly.

“Eat your supper, Dale.”

So that was that.

I want to tell you I said something sharp. I did not. I have never been a person who can find the words while my face is burning. I finished the four bites left on my plate, because my mother raised me not to waste food, and I stood up.

I scraped my plate into the scrap bucket for the dogs. I rinsed it. I set it in the rack.

Then I went down the hall to my room and took my duffel bag off the closet shelf.

I packed four pairs of jeans, my good boots, underthings, three shirts, my church dress, my mother’s Bible, and the framed picture of her on the tractor in 1998. I took my phone charger. I took the coffee can from the back of my sock drawer, which held eleven hundred and forty dollars I had saved over six years from selling eggs and doing taxes for two neighbors.

It took nine minutes. I know because the rooster clock said 6:40 when I walked back through the kitchen.

They were still eating.

“Where are you going with that?” Jake asked.

“Town.”

My father did not turn around in his chair. “Diesel’s not free,” he said.

“It’s my truck, Dad. I bought it with my 4-H steer money when I was sixteen. And it takes gas.”

Dale stood up like he meant to carry my bag. I shook my head at him, and he sat back down, and his eyes were wet, which I had seen exactly one other time, at my mother’s funeral.