Part 1: The Number on the Paper
My son-in-law pushed a sheet of notebook paper across the kitchen table. It held a single number, circled twice.
$800.
“That’s rent, utilities, and your share of the groceries,” my daughter said. She had both hands wrapped around a coffee mug that had gone cold long ago. “And then four days a week with the kids. So you’d be earning your keep, Mom. It wouldn’t be charity.”
Earning my keep.
It was a Saturday just after lunch, the first week of October. The kitchen window was cracked open, and the dryer fans at the elevator were running, the way you can hear them all over Holdrege at harvest. A low, steady roar, like a river that never gets anywhere.
I looked down at the paper. It had been ripped from a spiral notebook, the ragged edge still attached. Todd’s handwriting. He makes his eights like two circles stacked together, the way they teach you in second grade.
“Eight hundred,” I said.
“A one-bedroom at the apartments out by the highway is seven seventy-five,” Todd said. He said it to the salt shaker. He wouldn’t look at me. “We looked it up. So it’s fair. It’s right at fair.”
“And you’d have family,” Michelle said. “You wouldn’t be by yourself out there anymore.”
I am sixty-seven years old. My Social Security check, the one I draw now as Dale’s widow, comes to $1,640 a month. I kept the books at the lumber yard for twenty-two years, so I didn’t need a pencil for this. Eight hundred out of sixteen forty left me eight hundred and forty dollars. For my car insurance. My Medicare supplement. My gas. My pills. My tithe. And Christmas for two grandchildren.
And for that, I’d be the hired girl in my own daughter’s house, four days out of seven.
I want to be fair to her, because I’ve had time now to be fair. She didn’t say it meanly. That was nearly the worst part. She said it the way you’d read someone the terms on a used car. Pleasant and a little rushed. As if she’d practiced in the bathroom mirror and wanted to get through it before her nerve gave out.
“Can I see it again?” I asked. “The basement.”
“Sure, Mom. Of course.”
We went down. Todd stayed at the table.
They had done what they could with it. I’ll say that for them. A remnant of tan carpet was laid over the concrete. A double bed with a frame. A lamp from Michelle’s old bedroom at home. A dehumidifier ran in the corner, its hose trailing to the floor drain.
The single window sat up by the ceiling, about the size of a cake pan. All it showed was the bottom of the neighbor’s fence.
It smelled like wet cardboard and laundry soap.
“Todd’s going to put up a wall here,” Michelle said, pointing. “So you’d have your own room. Your own space. And the bathroom’s just up the stairs.”
“Up the stairs,” I said.
“It’s only thirteen steps.”
I counted them myself on the way back up. She was right. Thirteen.
Sadie had trailed us down. She’s four. She wore one sock and a princess nightgown at one o’clock in the afternoon. She stood on the bottom step with her thumb hovering near her mouth. Not in it. Near it. She’s trying to quit.
“Grandma,” she said, “are you going to live in the under?”
“We’ll see, sweet pea.”
“There’s a spider in the under. Eli named him Kevin.”
“Well,” I said, “then I’d have company.”
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. My friend Brenda from church said it right to my face later.
Why didn’t you just tell her no? Why didn’t you say, Michelle, I am your mother, and I will not be charged admission?
I could have. The words were right there behind my teeth.
But a no at your daughter’s kitchen table becomes a fight. And a fight becomes things said that can’t be swept back off the floor. I have one child. I had already buried my husband. I wasn’t about to risk the only other person on this earth who remembers Dale’s voice over a sheet of notebook paper.
So I said, “Thank you, honey. That’s a real offer, and I can see you two worked on it. Let me think on it.”
Michelle let out a breath. “Okay. But, Mom, you’ve got to be out of the farmhouse by the first. So.”
“I know when I have to be out.”
I folded Todd’s paper in half, then in half again, and tucked it into my purse. In the pocket where I keep my checkbook.
Todd watched me do it. He said nothing. Something crossed his face that I couldn’t read at the time. I’ll tell you later what it was.
Then I went out to my Buick and sat there a minute with both hands on the wheel.
I should tell you about the farmhouse, so you’ll understand why I couldn’t simply stay put.
Dale was a hired man. I say that with my chin up. He worked for Jim Olson south of town for thirty-one years. And for thirty-one years we lived in the hired man’s house on the Olson place. A square white two-story with a bad north wind and the best garden dirt I ever put a spade in.
The house came with the job. We never paid rent on it, and we never owned a single board of it. That was the arrangement. It was a fair one. It’s how a good many people out here have raised a family.
Dale died two years ago in March. He was greasing the planter in the machine shed, and he sat down on an overturned bucket to rest. And that was all.
Jim found him.
Jim Olson cried harder at that funeral than I did. Because I hadn’t started yet.
The house went with Dale’s job. So by rights, I should have been out of it the spring he died. The Olsons let me stay anyway. Two years and seven months, and they never once raised it. Jim’s wife sent over sweet corn every August. Jim plowed my lane every winter without being asked.
But their boy was coming home to farm. He and his wife had a baby and another on the way. They’d been renting in Kearney. And the hired man’s house was the only place on the farm to put them.
Jim came to my door in August with his cap in his hands. It took him ten minutes to get it said.
“You take until November, Judy. You take longer if you need it.”
“I won’t need longer,” I told him. “That house was always yours, Jim. You’ve been good to me past what anybody could ask.”
So that was that. Nobody was the villain in it. A young family needed a house. And I was a widow living alone in five rooms that belonged to somebody else.
That’s how I came to be sitting in my car in front of my daughter’s split-level, with a scrap of notebook paper in my purse saying my keep was worth eight hundred dollars a month.
I started the car. I meant to drive home. I had every intention.
Instead, I drove four blocks and parked in front of the feed store.
Brandt’s has stood on that corner since before I could drive. It still has the old wood floor, worn into a shallow trough from the front door to the counter. It smells of molasses and leather and the sweet, dusty scent of calf starter. Dale bought mineral blocks and fence staples there for thirty years.
Mr. Brandt is seventy-four. He still hauls fifty-pound sacks out to people’s pickups, though he sets them down a little more carefully than he used to.
For three weeks, an index card had been taped to the side of his cash register. I’d read it every time I stopped in for bird seed. And every time, I’d told myself it was none of my business.
House for rent. Two rooms and bath. See Brandt.
He kept the store open until four on Saturdays during harvest. It was twenty past two.
“Judy,” he said when I came in. “Black oil sunflower?”
“Not today.”
I put my finger on the card.
“Is this still for rent?”
He looked at the card. Then he looked at me. And I watched him work out the rest without my saying a word. Everybody in Phelps County knew the Olson boy was coming home.
“It isn’t much,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“Right behind the elevator. On the side street. It was my mother’s, the last eleven years of her life. I had a young fellow from the co-op in it till he got married in June.”
He was already lifting a key ring off a nail.
“Come on. I’ll show you. Roy, watch the counter.”
We walked. It was only a block and a half.
The trucks were lined up at the scale all the way back to the railroad tracks. Corn heaped gold over the sideboards. The drivers had their windows down and their arms hanging out, visiting from cab to cab. The air was thick with that red chaff that gets in your hair and your teeth this time of year.
The elevator towered over everything, white and tall, like a church with no steeple.
And there, tucked in its shadow like a chick under a hen, sat the littlest house I had ever seriously looked at.
White siding. A green shingle roof. A front porch just deep enough for a swing. And the swing was there, hung on chains, its seat painted not long ago.
One step up from the walk.
One.
“Mother couldn’t do stairs,” Mr. Brandt said, seeing me look.
He let me in.
The front room was the kitchen too. A sink under a good, big window. A gas stove with four burners. A refrigerator that hummed. Room for a table by the wall. A spot for a couch. A heating stove in the corner.
Through a door was the bedroom, with a closet. Off that, a bathroom with a tub that had a grab bar bolted into the studs.
That was the house. That was all of it. You could stand in the middle of the front room and see every corner you owned.
The window over the sink looked straight out at the elevator and the scale and the trucks.
“It’s loud in harvest,” he said. “The fans run all night. And the train comes through about two in the morning and again around five. Mother said she quit hearing it after a month.”
“I’ve been listening to a quiet house for two years, Mr. Brandt. I believe I could stand some noise.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s corn dust on everything from now till Thanksgiving. I won’t lie to you about that.”
“What are you asking?”
“Five fifty. You pay your own lights and gas. I keep up the roof and the furnace, and I mow it when I mow the store.”
Five fifty out of sixteen forty left me a thousand and ninety. I did that one without a pencil too.
“It isn’t much,” he said again.
“It’s got a door,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
He blinked at me.
“You want to think it over? Talk to Michelle?”
“I’ve been thinking it over for three weeks. Every time I bought bird seed.”
I wrote the check right there on the hood of my Buick. I didn’t want to walk back to the store and give myself time to turn sensible.
He tried to wave off a deposit. He said he didn’t need a deposit from Dale’s wife. I wrote it for the first month anyway and told him he could take the deposit out in trust.
He worked two keys off his big ring and strung them on a little ring of their own.
“Front and back,” he said.
I held them in my palm. Two brass keys, still warm from his pocket.
I went from my father’s house to the hired man’s house at nineteen years old. I have been somebody’s daughter under his roof, and somebody’s wife under her husband’s employer’s roof. And I was grateful for both. I truly was.
But I was sixty-seven years old before anybody ever handed me the keys to a place I had picked out by myself.
I’m not ashamed to say I had to turn and look at the elevator for a minute, so Mr. Brandt wouldn’t see my face.
Here’s the part I’m not proud of.
I didn’t tell Michelle.
