“I need to know it’s real.”
“It is real,” Harold said. “Any fool can see that.”
“Then maybe I need the other 3 to see it too.”
Harold’s last question before leaving was the 1 that mattered most.
“Are you testing them or punishing them?”
Raymond did not answer.
Spring came. Snow melted, came again, melted for good. The fields turned to mud and then to young green. Raymond recovered from the pneumonia, but age and cold lingered in his joints. Kevin did not call. Tammy called Nora twice. The shop had closed in February. Kevin was stocking parts for $14 an hour. Tyler had started missing school. Nora drove to Ames on a Sunday in March with groceries and found Kevin in the garage staring at a car he had no parts to fix. He told her to leave. She left the groceries anyway. The next day Tammy texted: He ate the soup. Thank you.
Diane called in April. Seven minutes. A new project. A late, almost remembered question about how her father was doing.
Nora came every Saturday.
By late May, the corn was knee-high again and the fields looked exactly like a life Raymond had pretended to lose. One evening he and Nora sat on the trailer step watching the light go soft over the land. She asked what Eileen used to say about this place. Raymond answered that the land would outlast all of them, so they ought to make sure they deserved it. Nora asked if he missed her.
“Every day. Every hour of every day.”
Then she said the thing she had been building toward gently for months. Eileen would want him warm. Comfortable. Back in the house. Surrounded by the things they had built together.
Raymond looked across the fields, the grain elevator against the sky, everything he still owned and everything he had pretended to lose.
“I think it might be time,” he said.
“Time for what?”
“Time to stop this.”
He told her he needed all 4 children back at the farmhouse the following Saturday.
He asked her to make the calls.
She did.
Marcus immediately wanted to know whether it was about the property.
Diane asked if Sunday was possible because of a conference call.
Kevin answered from the parts store, heard his sister say that their father wanted all of them there, and said only, “Fine. I’ll be there.”
Saturday came clear and green and warm.
Harold had spent 3 days airing out the farmhouse, running the furnace, wiping down surfaces, mopping the kitchen floor. The house was not pristine, but it was warm and smelled like coffee and lemon cleaner. On the dining table he and Frank had arranged everything Raymond had hidden for 9 months: financial statements, elevator contracts, portfolio documents. Proof of prosperity in black and white.
Nora arrived first, of course. Ben and the children came with her. She stopped on the porch, looking from the open farmhouse door to her father, and whatever question rose in her face she kept to herself.
