Randy slid the envelope across the table to me, right past the salt and pepper shakers.
“It’s the buyout,” he said. He kept his voice low so nobody at the next table could hear. “Like the agreement says. We had it figured with the bank this week. We didn’t want you to have to worry about it.”
We were sitting in the basement of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Blue Hill, Nebraska. Long folding tables. White paper tablecloths. Ham buns, scalloped potatoes and three kinds of bars. The same funeral lunch the ladies of St. Paul’s had served for every funeral I could remember.
I had a plate in front of me that somebody had filled. I hadn’t eaten one bite of it.
My husband had been dead six days.
I opened the flap of the envelope with fingers that didn’t feel like mine.
It was a cashier’s check from the bank in Hastings. Made out to Melissa Engel.
Five hundred thousand dollars.
My other brother-in-law, Scott, cleared his throat. He was sitting beside Randy, and he was looking at the paper tablecloth instead of at me.
“The house goes with the partnership, Melissa,” he said. “You know that. We’d need you out by planting. We figured that gives you plenty of time to find something in town.”
Plenty of time.
It was the middle of March. Planting would start the end of April. First week of May, if the weather stayed cold. That was about seven weeks to empty out twenty years of my life.
I looked over at the next table. My daughter, Abby, who was twelve, was sitting with my sister, Pam. She was pushing a lemon bar around her paper plate with a plastic fork.
She hadn’t cried at the service. Not once. She’d held my hand so hard during the last hymn that I still had red marks on my fingers.
I want to be honest about what went through me in that moment. Because I’ve told this story a few times since, and people always want me to say I was furious.
I wasn’t furious.
I was too tired to be furious. Mostly, I felt like somebody had opened a door in the middle of winter and let all the warm air out of the room.
I folded the flap of the envelope back down. I put it in my purse. I closed the clasp.
“All right,” I said.
Randy let out a long breath.
He looked relieved. That’s the part that stayed with me later, lying awake. Not the check. The relief on his face. Like he’d been dreading a scene, and he was grateful I hadn’t made one.
“We just thought a clean break would be easier on you,” he said. “No hanging on. No worrying about the bank or the markets.”
“I understand,” I said.
And I did. I understood exactly.
I got up and went to sit with my daughter.
