At the dealership, Derek said the word SON so often it started to sound like a job he’d already done.
My name was the only one on the farmhouse mortgage.
I’d paid it every month since before the wedding. His check went to the truck.
He had a list, and he kept it short.
A pellet rifle out in the grove.
A deer stand before first light.
He recited it at every fish fry in Marshalltown until people stopped asking.
I didn’t mind the list.
I had ten years in at the pork plant, and the superintendent job on second shift was finally close enough to see.
“It changes ZERO for you, Meg,” he’d say.
He said it a lot.
Then at the eleven-week ultrasound the tech swung her monitor around so we could see it.
A pair of heartbeats, side by side.
Derek laughed so loud a nurse leaned in from the hall.
I lay there with the paper towel on my stomach and started doing daycare math.
On the drive home he gave me the whole speech.
Bottles. The two a.m. runs to the Casey’s for diapers. Every single wakeup.
“Megan, you built second shift out of nothing,” he said.
“I’VE GOT THE NIGHTS.”
Parker and Beau came nine days early.
Parker was five pounds ten. Beau was five-four.
The dealership had laid Derek off for the winter, same as every winter, so he’d be home with them.
My leave ran four weeks.
I clocked back in on a Monday.
Twelve hours on concrete.
Then I pulled into my own yard and could hear the house from the truck.
NOISE.
The boys were both screaming.
The second sink was stacked full of bottles.
The towels in the washer had soured, from some day I couldn’t name.
Derek lifted his shoulders at me.
“They screamed the whole day,” he said. “I never got a nap.”
After that it was just how things went.
Twelve hours on the kill floor, then every hour till daylight on the kitchen linoleum with a bottle in each hand.
He slept through it.
The baby monitor sat on his nightstand, turned face down.
One Monday around ten-thirty, I had Beau on my shoulder and the shift schedule open on my laptop.
The price sticker was still stuck to the base of the new floor lamp.
Derek didn’t look up from his phone.
“Here’s what fixes this,” he said.
“QUIT THAT PLANT. Ten years of you is plenty.”
I looked at him.
“No,” I said. “I’m keeping my job.”
His eyes went to the ceiling like I’d asked him to cover the light bill.
“What’d you figure was coming?” he said.
“Mothers stay home. Find me one dad in this county who does.”
He went back to his phone.
Every promise from that drive home had been made for this exact minute.
I decided right there on the couch.
Next morning I had his coffee poured before he came down, and I smiled at him over the counter.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll put in my notice.”
“ON ONE CONDITION.”
The Accordion Folder
He laughed into his mug.
“Name it,” he said.
I went to the closet by the back door and came back with my grandfather’s accordion folder, the brown one with the elastic cord wound twice around it.
I set it on the counter next to his phone.
“Starting today, this house is yours for six weeks,” I said. “Every bill in there comes out of your money. The mortgage, the propane, the electric, the formula. And every night with the boys is yours, the way you said in the truck.”
He looked at the folder. He didn’t touch it.
“At the end of six weeks, if it’s paid and the boys are fed, I’ll hand in my notice.”
He slid the cord off with one finger and flipped through the tabs.
My grandfather had written the first ones in carpenter’s pencil. I’d added the rest in ballpoint the year the house came to me.
The top sheet in the mortgage slot had one name printed in the corner.
Mine.
“$1,140 a month,” he said. “On this place?”
“Every month since I was twenty-seven,” I said.
He did the math out loud, which he never did.
His unemployment ran $418 a week. His truck ran $612 a month.
“This is a joke,” he said.
I drank my coffee.
“The mortgage drafts out of my checking on the fifteenth,” I said. “Call the bank and switch it to your account, or pay me back the day it comes out.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll take your six weeks. I’ll have you home by May, and you’ll thank me for it.”
He put his hand out across the counter like we were settling a bet at the fish fry.
I shook it.
Then he picked up the folder and carried it out to the truck.
I watched from the window over the sink. He set it on the passenger seat and sat there with the engine running and his phone at his ear.
He didn’t back out. He just talked.
It went twenty minutes by the stove clock.
Parker started up in the bouncer, and then Beau, because Beau always followed him.
I left them to their father and laced my boots for work.
When Derek came back through the door, his hands were empty.
My Grandfather’s Four Acres
The farmhouse sits a mile and a half off the blacktop north of Marshalltown, on four acres my grandfather kept mowed right up until the fall he couldn’t.
When the estate came up, my uncles wanted it sold and split.
I was twenty-seven. I sat at a desk at the bank in town with a pen that skipped and signed until my wrist ached. I drove home with the keys on the seat beside me.
The grove came with it. The machine shed came with it, and the pantry door with my mother’s heights marked up the frame in pencil.
The folder was on the shelf in his bedroom closet, stuffed with propane receipts back to the eighties. I kept using it because throwing it out felt like throwing him out.
Derek moved in two years later with his truck and a gun safe.
A camo onesie from Fleet Farm came in the same load, size newborn, still on its little plastic hanger.
We hadn’t started trying. We weren’t even engaged.
He hung it in the hall closet next to my winter coat.
“Boy’s gonna need it,” he said.
His mother drove out that first Sunday. Carol walked the rooms slowly with her purse on her arm, the way she walks an estate sale.
She stopped in the pantry doorway and studied the pencil marks.
“A man needs a place of his own,” she said. “This’ll do him fine.”
I laughed. Derek laughed with me.
The folder stayed in the closet. Every bill went into it and came back out paid, and in four years of marriage Derek never once asked me what the propane company was called.
Joan Ostrander lives at the next place down the gravel. Her kids are grown and moved to Des Moines, and she used to wave from her mailbox when I left for the plant.
At my baby shower she held my hand in both of hers.
“Those boys ever need a lap, I’m a quarter mile down the road,” she said.
Derek bought the baby monitor himself, a month before they were born. The expensive one, with a camera and an app.
He set it up on his nightstand and tested it on me while I was in the shower.
“I’ll hear every peep,” he said.
At two weeks home it was lying face down on that nightstand.
He said the little green light kept him awake.
The Propane Bill
The first week, Carol came out every day by nine.
She parked her Buick in my spot by the shed, and I started parking in the grass.
She did the bottles and the laundry. She rocked Beau in my grandfather’s chair and told him his daddy was a saint.
I heard that part from the mudroom with one boot off.
Nights were the deal.
I moved into the old sewing room at the top of the back stairs with a box fan and a twin mattress, and I shut the door.
The first night I stood at the top of those stairs at three in the morning in my socks and listened to both of them go.
It went on a long time.
Then the floor creaked below me and Derek swore at the bottle warmer.
I went back and lay on the mattress with my hands flat on the sheet until the alarm.
Week one, he got up with them four nights out of seven.
Week two, it was two nights.
He started calling it “my shift.” He said it to Carol like he’d invented the word.
That Thursday she stayed for supper. She brought a hotdish and set it down in the middle of my table like a centerpiece.
“Derek tells me you sleep upstairs now,” she said.
“Just for the six weeks,” I said.
“My husband never got up with a baby in his life, and I never asked him to,” she said. “Derek’s doing the work of two people in this house, and you’re up there with a fan going.”
I ate my hotdish.
That same week Gary Lund caught me at the time clock.
“Superintendent’s yours if you want it, Meg,” he said. “The job’s on second shift. I need a yes or a no by the end of the month.”
I said I’d think.
On the second Monday, Ron from the propane company called my cell on my break.
“Meg, I sent a statement out to your place three weeks back and nobody’s touched it,” he said. “$310. The tank’s reading twenty-two percent.”
I thanked him.
That evening I stood beside Derek at the sink and said Ron’s name.
“Handled,” he said.
“Ron says it isn’t.”
“Ron’s full of it, then. I handled it. Quit checking up on me.”
After supper he went out to the truck again. The engine ran in the yard for a long time.
I stood at the thermostat in the hall and turned it down two degrees.
Then I climbed the back stairs, shut the sewing room door and lay down.
I did not come down when they started.
Sunday Dinner At Carol’s
Carol lives in town in a split-level off Third Street, with a carport and a deer mount over the television.
Sunday dinner there is a standing thing. Pot roast, the green Jell-O with the pears in it, Derek’s brother Wade and his wife at the long table.
I carried Parker in and Derek carried Beau, and the whole table said Derek’s name when he came through the door.
Somewhere between the roast and the pie, Carol tapped her glass with a spoon.
“I just want to say how proud I am of my son,” she said. “Carrying a whole house and two babies on an unemployment check. Most men wouldn’t.”
Wade clapped. His wife clapped. Derek looked at his plate.
I looked at him too.
“$1,140 a month, and the propane on top of that,” Carol said.
She had the number right, down to the dollar.
“He brought me the statements. I sat right here at this table and went through every one.”
My grandfather’s handwriting had been out on her kitchen table.
“About time his name went on that house,” she said. “He’s paying it. A man ought to be on the deed to the house he pays for. Any mother would say the same.”
“Makes sense to me,” Wade’s wife said.
Carol pushed a card across the tablecloth, past the potatoes, until it touched my plate.
It was a business card from the bank in town. On the back, in her handwriting, was a day and a time.
Thursday, ten o’clock.
“I already talked to the girl there,” she said. “She’ll have it all ready for you. Put on something nice.”
I put the card in my jeans pocket.
Derek still hadn’t looked up.
On the way home Beau fell asleep and Parker didn’t. I watched the ditches go by.
“Ma gets carried away,” Derek said. “Just talk, Meg.”
“The fifteenth is Thursday,” I said.
He turned the radio up.
The Monitor On The Nightstand
Thursday, a little after three in the morning, the crying came up through the sewing room floor and kept on.
I lay there and counted.
Ten minutes. Fifteen.
At twenty-five I went down the back stairs in my socks.
The boys were red in the face in their cribs, fists going.
Derek was asleep crossways on our bed on top of the covers, one boot still on.
The monitor lay on his nightstand, face down, where it had been since the second week.
I turned it over.
The screen showed the nursery, the two cribs, the boys, and a little speaker in the corner with a line through it.
The sound was off.
I didn’t wake him.
I took Parker on one arm and Beau on the other and carried them to the kitchen, and I made two bottles one-handed the way I’d learned to in those first four weeks.
When they were fed and heavy, I sat at the table with a boy asleep on each shoulder and opened the bank app with my thumb.
It was 4:10.
The mortgage had drafted at midnight. $1,140, out of my checking, same as every fifteenth for six years.
He never switched it. He never paid me back either.
I scrolled down. The electric, out of my account. The formula from Fareway, on my debit card, every can, bought on my way home from the plant because the cupboard was bare when I walked in.
The propane was still sitting unpaid.
I stayed at the table until the window over the sink went grey.
Then I laid the boys in the swing and the bouncer and texted Gary Lund.
“Yes to superintendent. Put me on second shift.”
He sent back a thumbs-up at 5:12.
At ten o’clock my phone buzzed four times in my locker.
I let it.
Carol’s Buick Parked At The Shed
The next three weeks, Carol’s bank card stayed in my jeans pocket and went through the wash twice.
Derek slept. Carol came days, and neither of them said the word bank in front of me.
The six weeks ran out on a Monday.
On my lunch break I went into the plant office and printed every page of my checking since the morning I shook his hand. I folded them in thirds and put them in my lunch cooler under the apple.
When I pulled in after my shift, the Buick was in my spot again.
The folder sat on my kitchen table. Carol was behind it with her purse in her lap, and Derek leaned on the counter with his arms crossed.
The boys were in the swing and the bouncer. Carol had put the camo onesie on Parker. It swallowed him to the knees.
“Time’s up, Meg,” Derek said. “I did my six weeks.”
“Every one of them,” Carol said. “Every night. Every bill in that folder. And you left me sitting at that bank on a Thursday morning like a fool, with the girl looking at me over her glasses. I called you four times.”
I set my lunch cooler on the floor by the door.
“He carried this house,” she said. “He carried it while you were out at that plant playing boss. The least you could do, the very least, is hold up your end. He shook your hand. He told me.”
“Put in your notice. Put his name on this house. Then we’re done talking about it.”
“Ma’s right,” Derek said. “A deal’s a deal. I shook on it, and so did you.”
“I’ve got it all worked out,” he said. “Ma comes Sundays. I’m back at the dealership in May. The boys grow up on four acres with their mother home, the way it’s supposed to go.”
“The way you did,” Carol said to him.
I bent down and opened the lunch cooler.
I took out the folded pages and flattened them on top of the folder, under Carol’s hands.
Then I went down the hall to our bedroom and came back with the monitor.
I set it on top of the pages, face down.
Carol looked at it a long time before she touched anything.
Then she turned the pages over one at a time. Her lips moved on the numbers.
“What is this,” she said.
“Ma,” Derek said.
“This says it came out of her account. The fifteenth. Every bill in here says her.”
“I was gonna catch it up,” Derek said. “When the dealership calls me back, I was gonna catch the whole thing up. Ma, she’s twisting it. What kind of wife sits and goes through her own bank—”
“My account,” I said.
Carol turned the monitor over. The line was still through the little speaker.
She set it back down, face down, the way she’d found it.
I went to the hall closet.
Derek’s winter coat hung on the hook beside mine. I took it down.
Then I crouched at the bouncer and unsnapped the camo onesie off Parker, one snap at a time, and folded it in half.
I laid the coat over the back of Carol’s chair and set the onesie on top.
Carol stood up and put her purse on her shoulder.
“Pack a bag, Derek,” she said. “The spare bed’s made up. She’ll come to her senses.”
He looked at me like he was waiting for something.
“I start superintendent on the first,” I said. “Joan’s taking the boys afternoons.”
“Who’s paying Joan?” he said.
I didn’t answer.
He packed a duffel and left the gun safe.
The Buick backed out over my grandfather’s grass and left two ruts to the road.
The Price Sticker
Derek sleeps in Carol’s spare room off the carport.
He comes out Sunday afternoons and takes the boys into town, and they come home smelling like her fabric softener.
The dealership took him back in May. A check comes in the mail from him most months, with no note.
I made a new tab at the back of the folder and wrote his name on it in ballpoint. The stubs go in there.
Joan comes up the gravel at one-thirty every weekday with her own coffee. I pay her half of what the superintendent job added to my check, and she’d take less if I let her.
I miss bedtime five nights a week.
Joan puts them down. She texts me a picture of the cribs at eight-fifteen, both of them out cold, and I look at it in the office off the kill floor with my hairnet still on.
The monitor sits on my nightstand now. Face up, with the sound on.
This morning was a Saturday.
I had Beau on my shoulder on the couch. Parker lay on the rug working one sock off with the other foot.
The sun came in flat through the front window.
The floor lamp was right there beside me, and the price sticker was still on its base, from the week before they came home.
I’d looked at that sticker through every feeding for months.
I got my thumbnail under the corner and peeled it off in one piece.
It stuck to my finger.
I carried it to the kitchen with Beau still on my shoulder and dropped it in the trash under the sink.
Then I came back and sat down with my boys.
Pass this one to somebody who’s been keeping the folder all by herself.
For more tales of relationships that didn’t quite pan out, check out His mother’s bed took the room where I earned our grocery money or discover what happened when My Husband Had A Daughter Who Never Came To His Bed. You might also relate to the struggles in His Car Was Running On The Money We Needed For Rent.
