Thomas never gave me the full details. He just brushed me away when I asked him, like I was a mosquito dive-bombing him at dusk, and then stalked off to the balcony to have a chew. “Same bullshit as usual, Moonie!” is all he said later on in bed—but I think it had something to do with what time he got to work. And I was in charge of the wake-up calls in our household. I had been sliding lately when it happened. I had my own seasons, too, as a farmer’s wife, and it was always like that at the end of summer with me. I wanted to sleep in, snuggle up next to my husband. Thomas said he did not mind, he never blamed me for a thing, he liked being close to me in the mornings, too. Still, I was afraid to push him as to the whys and what-fors of the fight. We squeezed as much as we could out of his savings and I let my mother slip me some cash here and there, until he figured out his next move. “All’s I know is, I never want to work another farm again,” he said. But what else do you know how to do? I thought. His unemployment killed any notion of having a baby, but Thomas was in no rush to have kids anyway. He saw all our high school classmates getting married and stacking up babies like pancakes in the morning. Filling themselves up with these new lives, is what I thought. Thomas said they were giving up their free time, giving up their peace and quiet. “I don’t want to share you with anyone,” is what he would tell me. I would not have minded a little one running around the house, but I could not argue when we did not have much money anyway. There were a few months in there I was hoping he would start college, like Timber, but I was not going to push. For now, we lived our unconventional life, me supporting my man.
So I had no fear as we watched the commercial for the Helping Hand Center, only a low-grade buzz of annoyance. It was like his pill diets, or that time he ordered a box of ginseng online and he sipped it in tea for six weeks straight, or when he hung that weight off it for an hour every night ( that he learned about from some show on ancient African tribes on the National Geographic channel). It was an idea that would flit and float around his brain like a bird until the season changed, and it was time to head somewhere new. I was the only thing that had ever stuck with him, and that was the way I liked it.
And then a week later his father died on the front porch of his house, sitting and watching the sun set with his dog sitting next to him. Alone in death, just him and his dog. (He had chased Thomas’s mother away years before; she lived in Iowa City with a new husband and a Guatemalan baby girl they had adopted our senior year of high school.) His father had an aneurysm. The doctor said there had been all this pressure building up in his brain for a while, maybe even for a year, and that could have been why he had been more difficult than usual. It was one of those things you can’t track or test, it just swells up like a balloon. Then it is like someone took a little pin and stuck it in your head and it explodes.
Three days after the funeral there was a call from the lawyer. Thomas’s dad had left him everything, the entire farm, and all of the money he had been stashing away for years. He had not been spending it on anything but building a bigger farm, a bigger legacy for his son. Here Thomas was thinking he could escape it, but there it was, more money than we could have ever dreamed of, and land, acres and acres for the taking. It was like we had won the lottery or something, only someone died. It was more money than we should have had. It was more money than we deserved. It was where our problems began.
“AND NOW,” I said to Valka, as she cradled my head in her lap, “I want it to end.”
We were curled up on the bed. My eyelids were swollen tight and I could only see a sliver of the room. My voice was raw. I had screamed too much. I had not stopped talking for an
So I had no fear as we watched the commercial for the Helping Hand Center, only a low-grade buzz of annoyance. It was like his pill diets, or that time he ordered a box of ginseng online and he sipped it in tea for six weeks straight, or when he hung that weight off it for an hour every night ( that he learned about from some show on ancient African tribes on the National Geographic channel). It was an idea that would flit and float around his brain like a bird until the season changed, and it was time to head somewhere new. I was the only thing that had ever stuck with him, and that was the way I liked it.
And then a week later his father died on the front porch of his house, sitting and watching the sun set with his dog sitting next to him. Alone in death, just him and his dog. (He had chased Thomas’s mother away years before; she lived in Iowa City with a new husband and a Guatemalan baby girl they had adopted our senior year of high school.) His father had an aneurysm. The doctor said there had been all this pressure building up in his brain for a while, maybe even for a year, and that could have been why he had been more difficult than usual. It was one of those things you can’t track or test, it just swells up like a balloon. Then it is like someone took a little pin and stuck it in your head and it explodes.
Three days after the funeral there was a call from the lawyer. Thomas’s dad had left him everything, the entire farm, and all of the money he had been stashing away for years. He had not been spending it on anything but building a bigger farm, a bigger legacy for his son. Here Thomas was thinking he could escape it, but there it was, more money than we could have ever dreamed of, and land, acres and acres for the taking. It was like we had won the lottery or something, only someone died. It was more money than we should have had. It was more money than we deserved. It was where our problems began.
“AND NOW,” I said to Valka, as she cradled my head in her lap, “I want it to end.”
We were curled up on the bed. My eyelids were swollen tight and I could only see a sliver of the room. My voice was raw. I had screamed too much. I had not stopped talking for an
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