Forty Chairs Under the Cottonwood

The envelope was the thick cream kind, the kind people use when they want you to know they spent money on the envelope.

It came on a Tuesday in July, with my name on the front in Lisa’s handwriting.

Inside was a letter from the country club in Sioux Falls, a seating chart for two hundred guests, and a bill for $38,000.

Across the top, in blue pen, my former wife had written one line.

“The bride’s father pays. Mom and I took care of everything else.”

I stood at the mailbox at the end of my lane for a long time.

A grain truck went by on the gravel and threw dust over me, and I did not even step back from the road.

I read the whole thing twice right there. A plated dinner with a choice of beef tenderloin or walleye.

A full open bar for five hours. A string trio for the cocktail hour, a band after, and something called a flower wall.

At the bottom was a deposit line. $6,000, paid, signed by Lisa Kemper.

Below that was a balance due date and a space marked responsible party, and somebody had typed my name into it.

My name was typed. It was not signed. I want to be clear about that from the start, because it matters later, and because I never did sign it.

I folded the papers back up, put them in my shirt pocket, and walked the quarter mile up to the house past the cottonwood and the cows.

The cows looked at me the way they always do, like I owed them something.

I am Roger Lindahl. I am fifty-eight years old. I climbed poles for the electric co-op for thirty-one years, and now I run eleven Angus cows on the home place a few miles outside Egan, in Moody County, South Dakota.

It is not much of a place. A white farmhouse my grandfather built in 1922, a red barn that has seen better paint, eighty acres of grass and alfalfa, and a creek that floods every spring whether it has a reason to or not.

Behind the house stands a cottonwood so big that three grown men holding hands cannot reach around it.

My grandfather planted it as a switch the year he built the house. It has outlived him, my father and my mother.

My daughter, Emily, learned to walk under that tree. She learned to drive a stick shift in that pasture.

She raised four 4-H steers in the pen beside the barn, and she cried over every one of them at the sale.

She is twenty-seven now, a nurse on the cardiac floor at the big hospital in Sioux Falls. She works nights.

She is steadier than I ever was, and she gets that from somewhere, though I have never been sure where.

In January she had come out to the farm with Josh Peterka, the young man she had been seeing for three years.

They sat at my kitchen table with their coats still on, because my furnace is old and the kitchen is the cold room.

Josh is a mechanic at a diesel shop in Brandon. Big hands, quiet, the kind of young man who looks at your truck’s tires before he looks at you.

I liked him the first time he told me my tie rod end was going out.