My Stepmother Sold the Farm, So I Married the Man Who Left novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Just a Funeral Lunch
Delores announces at Per's one-year lunch that the Rostad farm is sold to a sand company, and Solveig names Nels, home after six years, as her fiance; he says yes.
Delores tapped a spoon on her coffee cup until the whole church basement went quiet.
It was the one-year lunch for my father.
There were ham sandwiches and lemon bars on paper plates, and his photograph stood on an easel beside the coffee urn.
Two hundred people from the ridge and the valley had come to eat in his name.
"Before we say grace, I have news," Delores said, and smiled. "Per would want you to hear it from me."
I sat at the end of a long table with a sandwich I hadn't touched.
Hilda Skaar, my neighbor, put her hand flat on my knee.
"The Rostad farm is sold," Delores said.
The room breathed in all at once.
"A company called Silver Ridge Sand made us a very generous offer. We close on the thirty-first of October."
I was on my feet before I knew I had moved.
"Silver Ridge digs sand," I said. "They'll cut the east field and the whole ridge down to rock."
"It's called progress, honey. And Per left debts that needed paying."
"He left no debts."
"You ran the cows for one year, Solveig," Delores said gently, for the room. "You never saw the books."
Her son Travis leaned on the back wall with his arms folded and his good hat on.
He was grinning at his boots.
I had grown up on that ridge, and so had my father, and so had his father before him.
My brother Haakon was buried on the east side of it, under the oak.
"Dad's will says the farm is yours for your life," I said. "It says it is mine the day I marry."
A few heads nodded, because half of them had been at the reading.
"And you aren't married," Delores said. "You've never even been engaged. Per knew that when he wrote it, God rest him."
Someone near the urn coughed.
Hilda's hand tightened on my knee.
I had been home a year and a half, and I had walked those fields every morning.
I could not hand them to her over a ham sandwich.
"I'm engaged," I said.
The basement was so quiet I heard the furnace click on.
Delores laughed, a small, kind laugh, the one she used on children and the elderly.
"To whom?"
"I wasn't going to say until after the lunch," I said.
"To whom, Solveig?" Delores asked.
I turned around to find any man in the room.
The back door had opened while she talked.
A man stood in it with his hat in his hand and a canvas coat over one shoulder, and the afternoon light behind him.
He was taller than I remembered, and thinner, and his face had gone brown and creased at the eyes.
His nose still bent a little to the left where Haakon had broken it in the fifth grade.
Nels Torkelson.
He was my brother's best friend, and he had slept at our house every weekend of his boyhood.
He had left town the morning after Haakon's funeral without a word to me.
I had written him sixty-one letters in six years, and he had not answered one.
He was looking at me across two hundred heads.
I could not have said why I did what I did next, except that I had run out of time.
I lifted my arm and pointed at him.
"Him," I said.
Every face in the basement swung around.
Travis straightened off the wall.
Delores's smile stayed where it was, but it stopped reaching her eyes.
"Nels Torkelson?" she said. "The boy who left?"
"The man who's come home," I said, and my voice shook only a little. "We've been writing for years."
I had been writing him for years, and that was the only true part.
Nobody moved.
Nels looked at the pointed finger, and at the photograph of my father, and at the woman at the front of the room.
Then he looked at me.
I thought he would tell them the truth, and I thought I'd sit down and lose the farm in front of the whole county.
He put his hat on a folding chair.
He walked down the center aisle with every eye on him, until he stood at the end of my table.
His hand was shaking too.
"That's right," Nels said.
The room let out a noise, half a gasp and half a cheer.
Hilda said, "Well, I'll be."
Delores put down her coffee cup.
"Then I'll expect to see a marriage license by Friday," she said.
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