The First Envelope
The first envelope went across that table in March.
Twenties. Twenty-five of them. Counted twice at my kitchen counter that morning before church, under the one bulb that works in my kitchen, with the radiator banging and the snow coming down sideways outside the window.
I put them in a plain white envelope. I licked it shut. I wrote one word on the front in ballpoint pen.
Dad.
The Main Street Café in Fergus Ridge, Minnesota, opens at six every morning and closes at two in the afternoon. On Sundays it fills up twice. Once before the early service at Trinity Lutheran, and once after.
Dad’s coffee group has had the same table since 1987. The round one in the back, by the window, under the mounted walleye that Orv caught on Otter Tail Lake and swears weighed eleven pounds.
Four chairs. Dad. Orv. Leon. Pete. The same four men, every Sunday after the early service, for thirty-seven years. They drink coffee out of the café’s thick white mugs and argue about the Vikings and the price of beans and whose knee is worse.
I’d never once sat at that table. Not in my whole life. It was the men’s table. Everybody in Fergus Ridge knew that.
That first Sunday in March, I walked over after the early service and pulled a chair from the next table.
The talking stopped. Four old men looked up at me.
“Nicky,” Dad said. Surprised. “Something wrong?”
“No, Dad.”
I took the envelope out of my coat pocket. I slid it across the table to him. Past the sugar dispenser and the little metal pitcher of cream.
Dad looked at it. He looked at me.
Then he reached for it the way you’d reach for a church bulletin. Like it was ordinary. Like it was nothing. He put it in the inside pocket of his Sunday sport coat without opening it.
Orv, Leon and Pete sat right there with their coffee mugs.
Orv Tollefson, eighty, retired dairy farmer, with hands like baseball mitts and a hearing aid he only turned on when he wanted to. Leon Bakke, seventy-six, who ran the John Deere dealership in town for forty years. Pete Gunderson, seventy-four, who still drove a school bus three days a week and knew every kid in the county by name.
They watched the envelope go into Dad’s pocket.
Nobody asked. Not that first Sunday.
I sat there for about five minutes. Pete asked me how the roads were from my place. Leon asked if the feed store had gotten in the new mineral. I said yes. Orv didn’t say anything. He just looked at me over his coffee mug.
Then I said I had to go, and I got up and put my chair back at the other table, and I went home.
I cried in the truck. Just for a minute. In the parking lot behind the hardware store, with the engine running and the heater on high.
Then I went upstairs and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich.
Chapter Two: The Decree
The divorce was final on the fourteenth of February. Valentine’s Day. Scott’s lawyer picked the date. I don’t think he meant anything by it. I think it was just the first open slot on the Otter Tail County court calendar.
I’ve read the decree so many times the pages are soft.
Scott kept the house. The white farmhouse on County Road 35, five miles south of town, with the big red barn and the machine shed he built himself in 2015. The house we lived in for nine years. The house where I planted lilacs along the driveway and painted the kitchen yellow and hung my grandmother’s quilts on the wall.
He kept the shop. All his tools. The machinery.
He kept the three hundred acres he rents from the Lindgren estate and farms in corn and beans. He kept the lease. He kept the crop insurance. He kept the operating loan at the bank in Fergus Falls.
I kept my car, my clothes, my grandmother’s quilts, and half of a savings account that had four thousand, two hundred dollars in it.
And I kept the debt.
Three years ago, Scott needed a new tractor.
His old one, a John Deere 4440 from 1981, threw a rod during planting. He was in the middle of the field with forty acres left to go and a rain coming in. The bank wouldn’t extend his operating line. He’d already maxed it out on seed and fertilizer.
So he went to my father.
Dad had just sold his dairy herd that winter. Eighty-two Holsteins. He was sixty-nine, and his knees were shot, and nobody in the family wanted to take over the milking. So he sold them to a dairy in Stearns County and put the money in the bank.
That was his cushion. His retirement. He never had a pension. Never had a 401(k). Just Social Security and whatever the cows brought.
Scott sat at Dad’s kitchen table and asked to borrow eleven thousand dollars. For a down payment on a used 8320 from Leon’s old dealership. He’d pay it back, he said. Two years. Out of the crop.
Dad said yes before he even finished asking.
I was there. I remember it. Dad got out a yellow legal pad and wrote out a note in his slow, careful handwriting.
I, Scott Engstrom, and I, Nicole Engstrom, promise to repay Roy Haugen the sum of eleven thousand dollars ($11,000.00) for the purchase of a tractor. To be paid in full by December 31.
Dad didn’t want to make us sign anything. I told him we should. I keep books for a living. I know what happens when people don’t write things down.
So we both signed it. Scott first, then me. Dad folded it in thirds and put it in his Bible.
Scott never paid a dime of it.
Not that December. Not the next December. Every time it came up, there was a reason. The bean price dropped. The corn got hailed out. The combine needed a new feeder house.
Dad never asked. Not once. He’d just say, “Whenever you’re able, son.” And Scott would say thanks and change the subject. 