The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

Cole didn’t say a word when he handed me his phone. He just held it out across the kitchen table, the way he used to hold out a report card he wasn’t sure about.

On the screen was his father. Rick was standing on white sand in a straw hat, his shirt unbuttoned halfway, his arm around Brittany.

Behind them the water was a blue I had only ever seen on calendars.

Brittany had posted it. There were eleven pictures. A pool with a bar in the middle of it.

Two blue drinks with little paper umbrellas. Rick grinning at the camera like a man who had never once been behind on anything.

“Cancun,” Cole said. “They left Sunday.”

Then I handed the phone back. Cole turned it face down on the table and left his hand on top of it, like he was holding something down so it couldn’t get up again.

“You okay, Mom?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Eat your supper.”

He ate. He was nineteen and home for the weekend from the tech school in Watertown, and a nineteen-year-old boy will eat through almost anything. I sat across from him and didn’t touch mine.

What I was thinking about was a number. I had been thinking about that number for three years.

It was the first thing in my head when I woke up and the last thing before I fell asleep.

Thirty-eight thousand dollars.

The Paper That Said He Owed Me

Rick and I were married twenty-two years. We had the farm place six miles out of town, the house his grandfather built, eighty acres we rented out to a neighbor, and one son.

Our town has about 1,800 people in it, a grain elevator, two churches, a bar, a Cenex, and a school where I have cooked lunch for nineteen years. Everybody knows whose pickup is parked where.

The divorce took eleven months. Rick wanted out more than he wanted anything, so in the end he let me keep the house and the land.

The house was where Cole grew up, and I wasn’t moving him.

To make it come out even, the judge ordered Rick to pay me $38,000. It was called an equalization payment. It was supposed to be paid within one year of the decree.

My lawyer was a nice man from Watertown who charged $250 an hour.

By the time the decree was signed, I had paid him a little over $6,000. That came out of my retirement account, with the penalty.

The first year went by. Rick didn’t pay. He said the seed business was slow, he’d have it after harvest.

Harvest came. He said he’d have it after the first of the year. Nothing came.

I called my lawyer in the second year. He was kind about it. He said the judgment was good and would stay good.

Then he explained the rest of it to me, and I understood why he sounded sorry.

Rick didn’t have a paycheck. He was a seed dealer. He sold seed corn and soybeans out of a pole barn on the highway, under his own name, and paid himself whatever was left.

You can’t garnish wages a man doesn’t draw. His truck was financed. His house in town was in Brittany’s name. Everything he had was either borrowed or belonged to somebody else on paper.

“We can go after him,” my lawyer said. “But Tammy, I would be spending your money to chase a man who has nothing in his name. You could spend another five thousand and collect nothing.”

So I didn’t. I hung up the phone and went back to work, and that was the second year.

The third year, I stopped asking. I paid my truck payment on the fifteenth of every month.

I cooked tater tot hotdish and chicken patties for two hundred kids. I mowed the yard myself.