“That’s the truth, you two,” he said. “That’s a compliment. You never gave us one day’s worry. Either one of you.”
Judy was beaming at me.
She meant it. That was the thing I understood, sitting there in the smell of ham and scalloped potatoes and Easter lilies. She’d picked that card out special. She really thought she was handing us the best thing in the room.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s a lovely card.”
I could’ve asked why. The question was right there in my mouth.
But you can’t ask for a gift. A gift is the one thing in this world you’re never allowed to ask for. And it was Easter Sunday. And that woman had been on her feet since five in the morning cooking for all of us.
So I thanked her. And I passed the rolls to Kim.
And I was glad for Kim. I want that written down. I was glad for all three of them. Kim’s two boys were sleeping in one bed.
My name is Emily Schafer. I was thirty-three that Easter. Nate was thirty-four.
Nate didn’t say one word against his parents at that table.
He ate his dinner. He helped his father carry the folding chairs back down to the basement. He kissed his mother on the cheek at the door on our way out.
He didn’t say anything in the truck either. Not until we were past the city limits sign and the fields opened up black on both sides of the road. Freshly worked. Waiting on corn.
“How much have we got?” he said.
“Six thousand two hundred,” I said.
I didn’t have to look it up.
“What’s rent again?”
“Seven twenty-five.”
He drove a while without talking.
Nate is a diesel mechanic. He thinks the way he works. You find out what’s actually wrong before you ever pick up a wrench.
“I’m not mad at Kim,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m not even mad at them. They think they said something nice.”
“They did say something nice.”
“Yeah.”
He took the card out of his shirt pocket and set it on the dashboard. Bluebird side up.
“I’d just like to be worried about one time,” he said. “Just to see what it’s like.”
I laughed.
And then I wasn’t laughing anymore. And I looked out my window so he wouldn’t have to watch me.
“Then we need second jobs,” he said. “I’ll take harvest calls. Field service. Guys will pay cash to get a combine running at ten o’clock at night.”
“I’ll take the diner,” I said. “Patty’s been after me for a year to wait tables out at the truck stop.”
“You’re on your feet all week.”
“I sit all week,” I said. “That’s the trouble with billing.”
That was the whole meeting.
We never had another one.
So for two years, I billed insurance companies at the hospital from seven-thirty to four o’clock, Monday through Friday.
And on Friday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday mornings, I carried plates at the truck stop out on the highway.
I learned to carry four dinners up one arm. I learned which of the seed corn salesmen tipped well, and which ones left a religious tract instead. I learned that a tired woman can actually sleep standing up next to the pie case for about forty seconds. If she hooks one elbow over the top of it.
Nate worked his regular shift at the truck shop.
And then, from September to Thanksgiving, he drove out to whatever field somebody’s combine was broke down in.
He replaced a feeder house chain by flashlight in a sleet storm. He rebuilt an injection pump on the tailgate of his truck at midnight.
One night he came home at two in the morning with three hundred dollars cash in his coverall pocket. And a whole pumpkin pie a farm wife had made him take.
He ate half of it standing at the kitchen sink.
