My In Laws Gave Their Other Children 20000 and We Bought the Old Miller House

The envelopes were tucked under the Easter plates. One at every place setting. Each with a name written on it in my mother-in-law’s round schoolteacher handwriting.

Kim opened hers first.

She’s the oldest. Divorced two years. Raising two boys in a rented trailer behind the grain elevator. She looked at what was inside the envelope and put her hand flat over her mouth.

Then Jeff opened his. He’d been laid off from the Caterpillar plant in the fall. He was driving a propane truck part-time now. He read his, and he looked up at his father, and he couldn’t get a single word out.

Then Stacy. The baby of the family. Twenty-six years old, with her nursing school loans. She started crying into her napkin.

“Twenty thousand dollars each,” Ron said from the head of the table.

He had his hand resting on the back of Judy’s chair.

“Toward a house. Your mother and I sold the forty acres down by the creek. We want to see you kids settled while we’re still alive to see it.”

Everybody was up out of their chairs and hugging. The ham was getting cold. Kim’s boys wanted to know what was happening, and Kim couldn’t even tell them.

Nate and I had one envelope between us.

I slid my thumb under the flap.

It was a greeting card. It had a bluebird on the front.

Inside, Judy had written:

You two have always been so capable. We never worry about you. Love, Mom and Dad.

There was nothing else in the envelope.

I looked. I’m a hospital billing clerk. I check things twice for a living. So I checked twice.

I passed the card to Nate under the edge of the tablecloth.

He read it. He read it a second time, slower. Then he folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket.

And his ears went red. The way they do when a bolt shears off in his hand, or a customer calls him son.

Ron lifted his coffee cup toward us across the table.

“That’s the truth, you two,” he said. “That’s a compliment. You never gave us one day’s worry. Either one of you.”

Judy was beaming at me.

She meant it. That was the thing I understood, sitting there in the smell of ham and scalloped potatoes and Easter lilies. She’d picked that card out special. She really thought she was handing us the best thing in the room.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s a lovely card.”

I could’ve asked why. The question was right there in my mouth.

But you can’t ask for a gift. A gift is the one thing in this world you’re never allowed to ask for. And it was Easter Sunday. And that woman had been on her feet since five in the morning cooking for all of us.

So I thanked her. And I passed the rolls to Kim.

And I was glad for Kim. I want that written down. I was glad for all three of them. Kim’s two boys were sleeping in one bed.

My name is Emily Schafer. I was thirty-three that Easter. Nate was thirty-four.

Nate didn’t say one word against his parents at that table.

He ate his dinner. He helped his father carry the folding chairs back down to the basement. He kissed his mother on the cheek at the door on our way out.

He didn’t say anything in the truck either. Not until we were past the city limits sign and the fields opened up black on both sides of the road. Freshly worked. Waiting on corn.

“How much have we got?” he said.

“Six thousand two hundred,” I said.

I didn’t have to look it up.

“What’s rent again?”

“Seven twenty-five.”

He drove a while without talking.

Nate is a diesel mechanic. He thinks the way he works. You find out what’s actually wrong before you ever pick up a wrench.

“I’m not mad at Kim,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m not even mad at them. They think they said something nice.”…………..READ MORE NEXT PAGE 2