My son-in-law slid a sheet of notebook paper across the kitchen table. There was one number on it, 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 a long time 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, a little after lunch, the first week of October. The kitchen window was open a crack, and you could hear the dryer fans running down at the elevator, the way you can hear them all over Holdrege during harvest. A low, steady roar, like a river that never gets anywhere.
I looked down at the paper. It had been torn out of a spiral notebook, with the little ragged edge still on it. Todd’s handwriting. He makes his eights like two circles stacked on top of each other, 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 did not need a pencil for this. Eight hundred from 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 would 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 mean. That was almost the worst part. She said it the way you’d read somebody the terms on a used car. Pleasant and a little rushed. Like she’d practiced it in the bathroom mirror and wanted to get through it before she lost her nerve.
“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. There was a remnant of tan carpet laid over the concrete. A double bed with a frame. A lamp from Michelle’s old bedroom at home. A dehumidifier was running in the corner with a hose that went down to the floor drain.
The one window was up by the ceiling, about the size of a cake pan. All you could see out of it 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 going back up. She was right. Thirteen.
Sadie had followed us down. She’s four. She had on one sock and a princess nightgown at one o’clock in the afternoon. She stood on the bottom step with her thumb 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. I had the words right there behind my teeth.
But a no at your daughter’s kitchen table turns into a fight. And a fight turns into things said that can’t be swept back up off the floor. I have one child. I had already buried my husband. I was not going 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 put it in my purse. In the pocket where I keep my checkbook.
Todd watched me do it. He didn’t say anything. Something moved across 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 in it for a minute with both hands on the wheel.
I should tell you about the farmhouse, so you understand why I couldn’t just 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 went 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 brought it up. 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 piece of notebook paper in my purse that said my keep was worth eight hundred dollars a month.
I started the car. I was going to drive home. I had every intention of it.
Instead, I drove four blocks and parked in front of the feed store.
Brandt’s has been 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 like molasses and leather and that sweet, dusty smell of calf starter. Dale bought mineral blocks and fence staples there for thirty years.
Mr. Brandt is seventy-four. He still carries fifty-pound sacks out to people’s pickups, though he sets them down a little more carefully than he used to.
For three weeks, there had been an index card taped to the side of his cash register. I’d read it every time I went 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 was 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 of it without my having to say one 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 taking a key ring down 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 clear 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 stood over the whole business, white and tall, like a church with no steeple.
And there, tucked in its shadow like a chick under a hen, was the littlest house I had ever seriously looked at.
