The envelopes had been placed beneath the Easter plates, one at each seat around the table. Every envelope had a name written across it in my mother-in-law’s familiar, rounded handwriting, the kind that reminded you of a schoolteacher.
Kim was the first to open hers. She was the oldest of the children, divorced for two years and raising her two boys in a rented trailer behind the grain elevator. When she saw what was inside, she covered her mouth with her hand.
Jeff opened his next. He’d lost his job at the Caterpillar plant the previous fall and was now working part-time driving a propane truck. He read the contents of his envelope, raised his eyes toward his father, and seemed unable to find the words to respond.
Then came Stacy, the youngest in the family. She was twenty-six and still carrying the burden of her nursing school loans. As soon as she saw what she’d been given, she began crying into her napkin.
“Twenty thousand dollars each,” Ron announced from the head of the table. His hand rested on the back of Judy’s chair. “It’s to help you buy a house. Your mother and I sold those forty acres down by the creek. We want to see all our children settled while we’re still here to enjoy it.”
Chairs scraped against the floor as everyone stood up to hug one another. The ham was sitting untouched and getting cold. Kim’s boys kept asking what was going on, but their mother was too overwhelmed to explain it to them.
Nate and I had just one envelope to share.
I slipped my thumb beneath the flap and opened it. Inside was a greeting card with a bluebird printed on the front.
Judy had written a message inside:
You two have always been so capable. We never worry about you. Love, Mom and Dad.
That was all there was. Nothing else had been tucked inside the envelope.
I stared at it.
My job is hospital billing clerk. I spend my days checking figures and making sure everything adds up correctly. So I looked again, just to be certain.
Then I quietly passed the card to Nate beneath the edge of the tablecloth.
He read it once. Then he went over it again, more slowly. Finally, he folded it in half and slipped it into his shirt pocket.
His ears had turned red.
That’s what happens when a bolt breaks off in his hand or when a customer talks down to him and calls him son.
Across the table, Ron raised his coffee cup in our direction.
“That’s the truth, you two,” he said. “And it’s a compliment. Neither one of you has ever given us a single day of worry.”
Judy was looking at me with a huge smile. She genuinely meant every word.
That was what I came to understand as I sat there surrounded by the smell of ham, scalloped potatoes, and Easter lilies. She hadn’t picked that card at random. She had gone out of her way to choose it. In her mind, she was giving us something just as meaningful as what the others had received.
“Thank you,” I replied. “It’s a lovely card.”
I could have asked her why.
The question was already forming in my mind, almost ready to come out. But asking someone why they hadn’t given you a gift isn’t something you do. A gift is the one thing in this world you’re never supposed to request.
Besides, it was Easter Sunday. Judy had been standing in the kitchen since five that morning, preparing dinner for the entire family.
So I thanked her and handed the rolls over to Kim.
And I was happy for Kim.
I want to make that perfectly clear. I was happy for all three of them. Kim’s boys had been sharing the same bed, after all.
My name is Emily Schafer. I was thirty-three years old that Easter, and Nate was thirty-four.
Throughout the entire meal, Nate never said anything negative about his parents. He finished his dinner, helped his father take the folding chairs downstairs to the basement, and kissed his mother on the cheek before we left.
He remained quiet during the drive home, too.
He didn’t speak until we had passed the city limits sign and the fields stretched out on either side of the road, dark and freshly worked, ready for the coming corn season.
“How much have we got?” he finally asked.
“Six thousand two hundred,” I answered without needing to check.
“And how much is the rent?”
“Seven twenty-five.”
He continued driving for a while without saying anything.
Nate works as a diesel mechanic, and he approaches problems the same way he approaches his job. Before reaching for a wrench, he wants to understand exactly what’s broken.
“I’m not angry with Kim,” he eventually said.
“I know.”
“I’m not even angry with them. They honestly believe they did something nice.”
“They did say something nice.”
“Yeah.”
He reached into his shirt pocket, took out the card, and placed it on the dashboard with the bluebird facing upward.
“I’d just like to know what it feels like to have somebody worry about me for once,” he said. “Just once.”
I laughed at first. But the laughter quickly faded, and I turned toward my window so he wouldn’t see my face.
“Then we’ll need to find second jobs,” he said. “I’ll take harvest calls and field service work. There are farmers willing to pay cash if somebody can get their combine running again at ten at night.”
“I’ll work at the diner,” I replied. “Patty’s been asking me for a year to wait tables at the truck stop.”
“You’re already standing all week.”
“I spend the whole week sitting,” I reminded him. “That’s the problem with working in billing.”
And that was the entire conversation. We never needed another meeting to discuss it.
For the following two years, I continued working at the hospital, handling insurance billing from seven-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon, Monday through Friday.
On Friday and Saturday evenings, along with Sunday mornings, I worked as a waitress at the truck stop along the highway.
I got used to carrying four meals up one arm. I figured out which seed corn salesmen were generous with their tips and which ones preferred leaving religious pamphlets instead.
I also discovered that an exhausted woman can actually fall asleep standing beside the pie display for about forty seconds, provided she has one elbow resting on top of it.
Nate kept his regular hours at the truck shop. But between September and Thanksgiving, he spent his evenings and nights driving out to farms whenever someone’s combine broke down.
He changed a feeder house chain using nothing but a flashlight during a freezing rainstorm. He rebuilt an injection pump on the tailgate of his truck around midnight.
One night, he arrived home at two in the morning with three hundred dollars in cash tucked inside his coveralls. A farm wife had also insisted he take home an entire pumpkin pie.
He stood at the kitchen sink and ate half of it right there.
During those two years, eggs became a regular part of nearly every meal we ate.
Nate eventually decided to sell his bass boat.
He didn’t discuss it with me beforehand, and he didn’t make some grand announcement about his decision.
One Saturday, the boat was still sitting in our yard on its trailer. By the following Saturday, it was gone. All that remained was a patch of dead grass where the trailer had been parked.
Our savings account had another thirty-six hundred dollars in it.
He had loved that boat.
We continued attending every Sunday dinner at Ron and Judy’s whenever my work schedule allowed. We never told anyone about our plans or the extra jobs we were taking.
That had been Nate’s rule, and eventually I understood why he felt that way.
If we told his parents we were putting money aside for a house, it might sound as though we were dropping a hint. Almost like we were sending them a bill for something they had failed to give us two years earlier.
Neither of us wanted money that we had to ask someone for.
Kim eventually purchased a small ranch-style house on Maple Street, complete with a fenced-in backyard.
Jeff and his wife used their money as a down payment on a house in the new subdivision.
Stacy decided to leave her money in the bank until she graduated from nursing school.
We attended both housewarming parties. I prepared a casserole for each occasion, and I genuinely meant every bit of the effort I put into making them.
At Jeff’s housewarming, Judy approached me and gently squeezed my arm.
“You two will be next,” she said. “You’re both so good at managing money.”
“We’re working on it,” I answered.
The following spring, sometime in March, I was sitting at my desk in the hospital eating my sandwich. The county newspaper was open beside me, turned to the legal notices.
That’s the kind of section a hospital billing clerk naturally ends up looking at, whether she intends to or not.
The county trustee had published a list of surplus properties scheduled for auction. These were places where the owners had failed to pay their property taxes and nobody had come forward to redeem them. After years of unpaid taxes, the properties eventually ended up in the county’s possession.
Most of the listings were vacant plots of land or an old filling station that had burned down.
But one entry caught my attention.
It described a house with two and three-tenths acres along the county road north of town.
Everyone around there knew the property as the Miller place.
Dale Miller had died in that house, and his children, who lived in Arizona and Oregon, had stopped responding to the tax notices.
The house had been empty for six years.
You could see it from the blacktop whenever you drove past. It was a tall, white farmhouse whose paint had gradually faded to gray. The front porch drooped in the center, almost like an exhausted old horse.
That evening, I took Nate out there to have a look.
Nobody was permitted to enter the property before the county auction. You had to make your decision based on what you could see from the yard. Whatever you bought, you bought in its existing condition.
The weeds reached almost to my waist. An old cistern stood nearby, covered with a concrete lid. Right beside it was a small, stubborn patch of something red beginning to push through the soil.
Nate slowly made his way around the entire house.
He even lowered himself onto his stomach and crawled underneath the porch, using a flashlight to inspect what he could reach.
Afterward, he walked back toward the road and spent several minutes studying the roofline, his head tilted to one side.
He looked at it the same way he examines a driveshaft.
“The ridge is straight,” he said. “The foundation’s limestone, and it hasn’t shifted. The porch is beyond saving, though. And I’d bet the wiring is older than Dad.”
He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.
“It’s got good bones, Em.”
“How much do you think it would sell for?”
“How much do we have?”
“Forty-two thousand and a little extra.”
“Then that’s probably what it’ll sell for,” he replied. “Otherwise, somebody else will get it.”