The Monday after Easter, I called a dentist in Hastings named Dr. Reinke.
I’d heard from a friend that his Saturday hygienist was retiring. And nobody wanted the shift.
“It’s eight to four,” Dr. Reinke said. “Every single Saturday. Most of my farm families can’t get in during the week, so the book’s always full. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
For four years, I left our house on the east side of Kearney at six-thirty every Saturday morning. Half the year it was dark. I drove forty minutes to Hastings. I cleaned teeth for eight hours straight. I drove home.
Every Saturday paycheck went into a separate savings account at our bank on Central Avenue.
We never touched it.
Not once. Not when the furnace went out. Not when the transmission went on the minivan the second winter.
Luke’s snowplow overtime went into that account too.
When a big storm came through, the county ran the graders and plows around the clock. Luke would come home at four in the morning, eat a bowl of cereal standing up at the counter, and sleep for three hours. Then go back out.
We didn’t take a vacation in four years.
We drove that same minivan until it had two hundred and fourteen thousand miles on it.
Hailey’s school clothes came from the church rummage sale. And she never once complained. I still think about that.
The kids knew what we were saving for. We told them the very first summer.
Cody was five. He asked if he could have his old bedroom back. The little room at Grandma and Grandpa’s where he took his nap on Sundays.
I told him we’d see.
Hailey made a chart on a piece of poster board and taped it to the inside of the pantry door. A big thermometer. Like the one at church for the new roof fund.
Every month, she colored it in a little higher with a red marker.
That first summer, I looked up Grant Ostrander’s Denver address on the county tax records. And I wrote him a letter.
I kept it short.
I said my husband grew up on that place. I said his mother had planted the lilacs by the front porch. And I asked if I could keep them watered.
He called me about a week later. He was polite. A little puzzled.
“Sure,” he said. “Water whatever you want. I’m only out there in November.”
So once a month, from May to September, we drove out on a Sunday afternoon. The four of us. With two five-gallon buckets and a garden hose we hooked up to the hydrant by the barn.
Luke mowed the road ditch along the front of the yard. From the mailbox all the way down to the culvert at the end of the driveway.
The county mowed the rest of the road twice a year. But that stretch by the house had always been June’s. She’d always kept it nice.
The second winter, a county snowplow clipped the mailbox post and laid it over flat in the snow.
It wasn’t Luke’s truck. But it was Luke’s department.
He went out there on his own time with a post-hole digger and a bag of Quikrete. And he set a brand-new post. Plumb and solid.
We never once went inside the house.
We never went in the barn.
We watered the lilacs. We mowed the ditch. We picked up the shingles the wind tore off the machine shed roof. And then we went home.
Walt went to every one of Cody’s Little League games in those four years.
He sat in the top row of the bleachers in his seed cap. He clapped when Cody got a hit.
He came to Hailey’s band concerts. He came for Thanksgiving and Christmas and every birthday.
He was polite to me. I was polite to him.
And neither one of us said one single word about the farm. Not once. In four years.
It sat there between us at every meal like a dish nobody would pass.
In February of the fourth year, the notice ran in the Kearney Hub.
A sale bill went up on the bulletin board at the co-op the same week. Right next to the seed corn flyers and a poster about a lost dog.
PUBLIC AUCTION. Brandt Homeplace. 80 acres more or less with improvements. Sale to be held on site. Last Saturday in March, 11 a.m. Kruse Auction Service. Denny Kruse, auctioneer.
Grant Ostrander had bought a bigger place up in South Dakota where the pheasants were better. He was done with Nebraska.
I read the notice standing in my own kitchen with my coat still on.
Then I called Mr. Ostrander before Luke was even home from work. I wanted to be the very first call he got.
“Mr. Ostrander, this is Amy Brandt. I watered the lilacs.”
“I remember,” he said. He sounded friendly.
“We’d like to make you an offer before the auction,” I said. “A fair one.”
He was quiet for a second.
“I’m sorry. I’ve already signed the listing with the auction company. And I want a public sale. That way nobody can ever say I played favorites. But you’re welcome to come and bid like everybody else.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
It was fair. It was more than fair, if I’m honest. And he wished me luck before he hung up.
The terms were printed at the bottom of the sale bill.
Ten percent down on sale day. Balance due at closing, on or before April 30. No contingencies. Every bidder had to register on site and show a letter from a bank.
So the next morning, I went to our bank and sat down across the desk from the ag loan officer, Tom Riley. I had four years of savings statements in a manila folder.
We had seventy-one thousand, four hundred dollars.
Tom went through it twice.
He asked about Luke’s county job. And my two offices. He pulled our credit. He called a man he knew who’d appraised land in that same township the year before.
“Here’s your number,” he finally said.
He wrote it on a yellow sticky note and turned it around so I could read it.
Three hundred and five thousand.
“That’s your bid,” Tom said. “Not one dollar over. I mean it, Amy.”
He typed up the bank letter and signed it.
I put that sticky note in my coat pocket.
And it stayed there until the auction.
