My Stepmother Sold the Farm, So I Married the Man Who Left novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Terms

In the church parking lot Nels says he owes Haakon, they set a one-year deal with separate rooms, and they find surveyors already in the east field.

I found him in the church parking lot, leaning on a dented gray truck with North Dakota plates.

The lunch was still going on inside, and I could hear Hilda telling someone loudly that she had always known.

"You said yes," I said.

"You pointed at me," Nels said.

"I pointed at the first man I saw."

"I'm aware."

He had been gone six years, and the Dakota wind had weathered him until I hardly knew his face.

I knew his hands, though.

They were big and square, and the left one still had the white scar across the palm from the winter we built the corn crib.

"I was leaving tonight," he said. "I came to stand at Per's picture for five minutes, and then I was driving back."

"Then why didn't you let me sit down and lose?"

He looked at the church door, where the congregation was starting to drift out in twos and threes to stare at us.

"Because I owe Haakon," he said.

I felt that go through me.

It was not the answer I wanted, though I couldn't have said what I'd wanted.

"I'm not a bill, Nels."

"I didn't say you were," he said.

"You said you owe my brother. That's what I am. Something you owe."

He took his time answering, which he had always done.

When we were kids he could stand through a whole argument with his mouth shut and then say one sentence that ended it.

"You asked for a husband in front of two hundred people," he said. "I'm the one who was in the doorway."

I put my hand over my eyes.

"It's a lie, and she'll check. Delores will have a clerk at the courthouse by Monday."

"Then it'll have to be a real license," Nels said.

I took my hand down.

He was serious.

Behind him, across the lot, Delores was watching from the church steps with her purse held in front of her in both hands.

"One year," I said. "That's all. We marry, and the farm passes to me and my husband."

"And Delores moves to town."

"And after a year I sign whatever you want, and you go back to North Dakota."

"All right," he said.

"Separate rooms."

"All right," he said again.

"You sign a paper the day of the wedding that says you have no claim on the land. Not a field, not a fence post."

"I wouldn't take it," Nels said.

"I know you wouldn't. Sign it anyway."

He nodded.

I made myself say the last one in a flat voice.

"And nothing in private that we'd be embarrassed to explain to Hilda."

The corner of his mouth moved.

It was the first time I'd seen it do that in six years, and I wished I hadn't.

"Hilda's questions are the only thing I'm afraid of," he said. "Shake on it."

He held out his scarred hand.

I took it, and his fingers closed all the way around mine, dry and warm and rough.

I let go first.

"Why didn't you ever write back?" I asked.

I hadn't meant to ask it, not on the first day.

His face closed.

"Get in your truck, Sol," he said. "I'll follow you home."

Nobody had called me Sol since Haakon.

I got in my truck and drove the nine miles to the ridge with my hands tight on the wheel.

His headlights were in my mirror the whole way, steady and close.

I told myself it was only because he did not know the road anymore.

He knew every turn of it.

At the top of the lane the farm lay out under the late sun.

There was the white house, the red barn, and the long hay fields rolling down to the creek.

I stopped in the yard and sat there with the engine running, because the east gate was open.

I had closed that gate myself that morning.

Two white pickups stood in the grass beside it.

A man in an orange vest was setting up a tripod at the edge of the ridge field.

My father had grown the best corn in the county on that ground.

Another man was walking the fence line with a roll of pink tape.

Travis's red truck was parked between them with the door hanging open.

Nels's truck stopped beside mine, and he got out and stood looking at the surveyors for a long moment.

"That didn't take long," he said.

"She called them before the lunch," I said. "She called them before she told anyone."

My voice sounded small in the yard.

Nels shut his truck door very quietly.

"Which way do you want to start?" he asked.

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