The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin

We had just finished singing, and Mom was leaning in to blow out the candles, when Cheryl reached into her purse and set a folded sheet of notebook paper next to my coffee cup.

Eight thin candles stood on the cake, still lit, the flames leaning in the draft from the window. Kathy had baked it herself, a burnt sugar cake, and it leaned a little on the left.

“Before we cut it,” Cheryl said. “We need to talk about something, Marvin. All of us. While Mom’s here to hear it.”

I unfolded the paper. It was Cheryl’s handwriting, the same careful printing she used on the 4-H fair entry tags when we were kids.

Twenty years down the left side. Two columns of numbers across. At the bottom, circled twice in blue ink, a figure I had to read three times before it made sense.

Sixty-four thousand dollars.

“That’s back rent,” Kathy said. She was looking at the cake and not at me. “On Mom’s 160. For the twenty years you’ve farmed it.”

The dining room went so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on in the basement. The lamp over the table hummed the way it always had, the one Dad wired himself in 1979.

Mom pulled her blue cardigan closer and sat back. She had been about to blow. The cake knife lay beside her plate, and the candles kept burning.

Lori and the two brothers-in-law, Jim and Dale, were in the kitchen dishing up the ice cream. I could hear the scoop scraping the bottom of the carton. Nobody in there knew yet what had been set on the table.

Or maybe they did. I found out later Dale knew. Jim did not.

I am not a fast talker. Never was. Dad used to say I chewed on a sentence like a cow on cud before I let it out, and he did not mean it as a compliment.

So I sat there with that paper in my hand and I chewed.

I want to tell you how we got to that table, because none of it makes sense unless you know where the 160 came from and how I came to be the one farming it.

Dad died in March of 2006. Twenty years ago that very month. He went out to the shop after supper to put a new bearing on the auger and Mom found him on the floor at nine o’clock.

I was thirty. I had my own 300 acres by then, rented ground mostly, a quarter I was buying from the Kucera estate on contract, and a wife and a little boy and a pickup with two hundred thousand miles on it.

Cheryl was thirty-four and married to Jim and living in Columbus. Kathy was thirty-two and teaching third grade over in Seward. Neither one of them ever wanted to farm. They said so at the funeral lunch in the church basement, with their plates of ham and scalloped potatoes balanced on their knees.

Mom asked me two weeks later. Sat me down at that same dining room table with a cup of coffee and a legal pad.

“I want you to farm the home 160,” she said. “Your dad would want it kept in the family and kept right. I’ll set the rent. You don’t argue with me about it.”

I argued with her about it. Of course I did. I told her she should rent it out to the Hruby boys for top dollar and live comfortable.