My In-Laws Gave Their Other Three Children $20,000 for Houses and Gave Us Only a Card Two Years Later, We Bought the Old Miller Place for $41,500

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.
We are still very capable. But come August, you will have somebody new to worry about.

And I mailed it back to her. In a fresh envelope.

Ron was at our front door within the hour.

He had his level with him.

He said the back bedroom upstairs was going to need shelves.

Before he left, he went into the pantry and stood there looking at the door frame for a long time.
There’s room on that door frame for a good many more marks.

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