They Sold Me, Then My Dead Mother Came to Take Me Home novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Paid in Full

Janet tells Mara her sale was paid off two years ago and she has been free all along; her father and brother arrive at the gate with a deputy and a guardianship order.

I hit the floor of the trailer on my hands and knees.

Jonas did not touch me.

He stood in the open door with his hat crushed in one fist, waiting for me to say yes.

"Get out," I said.

"Mara."

"Get out of my trailer."

He went.

I heard his boots on the steps, and then the old hands murmuring, and then Janet's voice cutting across all of it.

"Every one of you, back to work. This is not a rodeo."

Janet came through the door in her apron with flour to the elbow.

She was sixty-three, with short gray hair and strong forearms, and she had brought me soup every day for seven years.

She did not say a word.

She got her shoulder under my arm and heaved me onto the cot.

Then she sat on the folding chair, took off her reading glasses and let them drop on their cord.

"Janet," I said. "Did you know?"

"Know what, honey?"

"That my mother is alive."

"No." She said it right away. "I swear to you on my husband's grave. I found out when you did, standing at the window."

I believed her.

"Did you know he knew?" I asked.

She looked at the floor.

I understood before she answered.

"Janet."

"Not that," she said. "Something else. Something I wasn't supposed to say, and I've been wanting to say it for two years."

"Say it."

She pressed her lips together, then let out a hard breath.

"You were bought," she said. "I never liked the word, but that's the word. Jonas's father paid your father two million dollars to cover a debt, and your father signed you over as part of it."

"I know that. I was there."

"He died two years ago."

"I know that too."

"Honey, the week after the funeral, Jonas sat down with a lawyer and a checkbook. He paid your father the whole two million back. Every cent."

I stared at her.

"The paper your father signed is cancelled," Janet said. "It's been cancelled for two years. You're not owned by anybody, Mara. You haven't been since the spring before last."

I heard the clock on the wall.

I heard a truck door, far off.

"That's not possible," I said.

"It is."

"He would have told me."

"He wanted to," Janet said. "He stood in my kitchen with the check in his hand and said, if I tell her she's free, she'll leave, and she has nowhere to go. Her family will come and take her. And then he put the check in an envelope and went out and mailed it."

"He had no right."

"No. He didn't."

"He kept me here two years believing I was his father's property."

"Or he kept you here two years where nobody could get at you."

"Don't," I said. "Don't defend him."

"I'm not," Janet said. "I told him to tell you the day he mailed it. He said he would when you could stand, so you could leave on your own feet."

My eyes burned and I did not let them spill.

Two years.

I had asked him once, in the first winter, whether he would let me go if I could walk out the door.

He had said, "Yes."

He had not said I could already go.

I was thinking about that when Janet turned her head toward the window.

"Mara," she said, in a different voice. "There's a car at the gate."

I pulled myself up the wall to look.

It was a long black sedan with a county sheriff's cruiser behind it, and it was coming up the gravel slowly, without stopping at the gate.

My father got out of the sedan.

Ernest Eckhart had been a big man and he was heavier now, red in the face, in a suit that had been cut for him ten years and forty pounds ago.

My brother stepped out of the other side.

Corbin was thirty, blond and clean, with a folder under his arm and the same small smile he used to wear when he found something of mine to break.

A deputy got out of the cruiser behind them, young and sweating, holding a clipboard against his chest.

Jonas had walked to the gate to meet them.

He stood in the middle of the road with his arms at his sides.

"That's a county order," Janet said quietly. "It's a real one. It'll say they can take you."

"It says I can't manage my affairs."

"It says they can come in and look at you and decide."

"Then let them look."

"Mara."

"My legs shake," I said. "They don't get to have the rest of me."

I took the cane off the cabinet door.

Janet stared at me.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going out there," I said.

"You can't make it to the gate."

"I'm not going to the gate. I'm going to the step. They can come to me."

I put my weight on the cane and my free hand on the wall, and I took the first step across the trailer floor.

My knee wobbled.

I took the second.

Outside, my father's voice rose over the gravel, loud and hearty, the voice he used on men at the mill.

"Makinen! We're here for my daughter."

Jonas did not move from the road.

"Then she'll have to come out," he said, "and tell you herself."

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