The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

My father-in-law slid the lease across his kitchen table the way he slid seed bills across it, flat and squared up, with one thick finger holding it down so it would not curl.

“Twenty-five years,” Gene said. “Eleven hundred an acre. Every year, rain or no rain, corn or no corn. They start setting posts in May.”

It was the second week of March in north-central Kansas.

The kitchen smelled like coffee that had sat on the burner since noon, and the wind was working at the storm door the way it always does out there in March.

Cody was beside me. He had come straight from the shop and still had grease in the creases of his knuckles. He read the first page twice before he looked up at his father.

“Which ground?” he asked, though I think he already knew. I think we both did, from the way Gene would not quite look at either of us.

“The forty by the highway,” Gene said. “It’s flat, it’s right by the power line, and it’s the only piece they wanted. They don’t want bottom ground. They want it high and dry.”

High and dry. That was exactly why he had given it to us.

Or said he had, standing in the church parking lot after our wedding five years earlier with a paper plate of cake in his hand.

I remember the exact words. I had replayed them a hundred times. “That forty by the highway is yours when you’re ready. Put the house right up by the road, facing south, so your mother-in-law can see your lights from ours.”

His wife, Cody’s mother, had been alive then. Her name was Deb, and she had squeezed my arm when he said it.

She died two years later, in the fall, of a cancer that moved faster than anybody thought cancer could move.

We had house plans on our refrigerator. Real ones, from a man in Salina who drew farmhouses, with the kitchen window drawn in on the south wall because I wanted to look at the road and see who was coming.

Cody had already pulled the old fence along the north side of that forty the summer before, so we could put in a driveway.

Gene had watched him do it and handed him the fence stretcher.

“So what about us?” Cody asked. His voice was steady. Cody’s voice is almost always steady. It is one of the first things I loved about him.

“Take the bottom,” Gene said. “The quarter down by the river. There’s plenty of room down there. Pick any spot you like and it’s yours.”

“Dad, that’s the Solomon bottom,” Cody said. “It floods.”

“It flooded in ninety-three,” Gene said. “That was over thirty years ago. You put it up on fill, you put in a good foundation. People build in bottoms all over this state.”

“The water stood to the top of the fence posts in ninety-three,” Cody said. “Grandpa told me. He said you could fish off the hay barn roof.”

Gene shrugged. It was not a mean shrug. It was the shrug of a man who had already argued this with himself and won. “Kids build anywhere these days,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

I am a vet tech. I spend my days holding animals still while somebody does something that hurts them for their own good.