Inheritance
Emily Hobby
“Katie, take Ellie upstairs and get her ready for bed. It’s a school night tonight.” Beatrice’s voice cut through the silence that had hung heavy over the old kitchen table. It seemed too loud and too sharp for the air in the room of the farmhouse. “Your father and I need to talk business.”
“But what about dessert?” Ellie asked, tucking her chin and not moving from her seat. Ever so slightly, she pushed out her lower lip, just for emphasis.
“Come on, Mom and Dad need to talk,” Katie said, her gaze darting between her parents’ hands. Her dad’s still held the fork and knife, hovering over his empty plate. Her mom’s were folded tightly in her lap. She didn’t look up to meet their eyes. “I’ll read you more Junie B. Jones after you brush your teeth.”
Adam watched his youngest daughter flop out of her chair, head tilted back, eyes towards the heavens as if wondering what sort of God would burden her with a life filled with such injustice and no dessert. She followed her sister up the stairs with a long sigh.
As soon as the girls were out of sight, he stood, pushing the old wooden chair out from the table and stood. No matter how long they lived here, he still thought of that chair as his father-in-law’s. It still had pale scratches on the left arm from his battered steel Seiko. Beatrice could have covered them up by now, but there they stayed. He crossed to the fridge, opening it and pulling out the six-pack he’d picked up yesterday from the gas station. He wasn’t usually a drinker, but once a month he’d bring one home. It made the nights they had to review the numbers a bit more bearable.
Beatrice cleared the table with practiced efficiency, stacking plates and cups and shaking napkins out over the sink. Silently, she retrieved the scuffed leather portfolio from the cabinet above the coffee maker and placed it on the table, turning back to the sink to wash the dishes. Adam listened to the quiet clinks behind him, flipping through the receipts absentmindedly. He already knew what they said. When the water switched off, Adam could hear her pause for a moment. He knew what she looked like without having to turn around. Her arms would be crossed over her chest, eyes tight and wrinkles deepening in resolve. They each hung there in silence, slowly preparing to acknowledge the truth of their situation. All of the receipts were laid out on the table now. The first beer bottle stood empty off to his left. He fixed his gaze on the back of the couch, trying to clear his mind. The crocheted afghan Beatrice’s great aunt had made for their wedding lay limply across the faded brown suede. The mantel with the family pictures lined up in a dustless row, Ellie as a baby, Katie holding her on her lap, arms barely making it across Ellie’s round milk belly. The moment broke. It was time. She walked to the table, absentmindedly setting the church-key next to Adam and squeezing his shoulder as she passed, sitting down across from him and folding her hands softly on the table.
“We need to sell off some land,” she said, her voice as level as she could keep it. Just business.
“That’s not what your father would have wanted,” Adam replied automatically, sticking to the script, not lifting his eyes from the papers in front of him. This was how it always went. He had to play the part of the historian, giving her reasons they couldn’t change the status quo. She’d say they had to change to survive but not really mean it; he’d say they had to focus on what had worked in the past but not really mean it. She’d agree that they had to preserve her parent’s legacy; they’d agree to make the minimum payments and ignore the interest piling up. It was her way of letting him win. He’d propose the plan they agreed on even though they both knew it was what she wanted.
“Well it’s not really about what he wants anymore, is it,” she said. Adam’s eyes jolted up. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go. His father-in-law’s wishes were the trump card that won every argument. The automatic veto. “You’ve seen the numbers. The harvester was supposed to pay for itself after this year but between the summer drought and wet fall we still have half the principle left and there’s not enough corn to cover it. Between that and the soybean tariffs, we won’t have enough to keep things running through the winter, let alone have enough for seed in the spring. We aren’t making a dent in the balance in a good year, and this is not going to be a good year.”
“But this isn’t what your father wanted,” Adam said again. He knew it wasn’t the right thing to say but it was the only solid thing his mind could grab. She wasn’t playing by the rules.
“It’s the only way,” she said, fishing the map of the property out from under the pile of bills. “If we sell the back twenty here, that developer who has been sniffing around on the other side of the highway might bite. We could get enough to pay off the harvester and put some away for the spring, maybe even chip away at the second mortgage. Start fresh next year and hope the rain is better. It could work.”
“Or it could just happen all over again,” Adam said, finally catching up. “You can barely count on the rain anymore. First year we were married it came like clockwork, and now … .” He trailed off. Beatrice shook her head.
“A couple years isn’t enough to talk like that. The family has seen rough seasons before. When I was a kid there was a year, I think I was nine or ten, it didn’t rain from March until mid-June. Mom and Dad thought they were going to lose it all, but they sold off some land and in a few years they could buy it back. It’ll work out.”
“We couldn’t sell it even if we wanted too,” Adam spoke slowly, measuring each word carefully. They were in unknown territory. “We’re upside down on the second mortgage. Even if we find a buyer, the bank is going to take everything we owe and we’ll have to pay the difference. It’ll be worse than if we never sold.” For the first time in a while, he believed what he was saying.
“Well we can’t do nothing,” she said, almost spitting the words out. “Right now we can barely pay enough to cover the interest. You can’t hide from the math. And what happens if someone gets hurt? Or when the girls start thinking about college? Short-term solutions aren’t going to fix the problem, Adam.”
He flinched at the sound of his name. She paused, letting out a long breath and staring at the ceiling for just a moment. Her hands unclenched with a conscious effort, opening and closing, working blood back into the fingers. Adam took a long, slow drink, stalling.
“What brought this up?” he asked carefully. “We both know you’ve never really wanted to sell off land before.”
“Nothing,” she said, but did not meet his eyes. He waited, letting her figure out how to tell him. She wasn’t meeting his eyes, her hands fidgeting with her wedding ring, twisting back and forth. Finally, she stopped. “It was the girls’ letters for Santa.”
“Did Katie ask for that horse again?” he asked, smiling wryly. It had been the first and only thing on her list for the last four years.
“No, no, I think she’s finally given up on that one,” Beatrice said, her eyes still downcast and heavy. “She asked for Santa to help her parents with money. So we could be happy again.”
“Oh,” Adam felt his throat beginning to close up. He thought they’d been so careful. Only talking about finances once the girls were upstairs, parceling out enough money for their soccer uniforms, buying almost good-as-new clothes from the thrift store. But Katie was smart. Of course she knew they were worried.
“Ellie hasn’t caught on yet, but she’s starting to ask questions,” Beatrice continued quietly. “We couldn’t buy her Girl Scout cookies.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Adam said slowly, trying to keep the tears out of his eyes.
“I know it’s not a perfect answer, but we need to do something. We could sell the land, it has to be worth something. Stay on as caretakers maybe, or you could get an office job in town. I can handle everything, especially with Katie’s help. But the numbers aren’t going the right way, you know that.”
As she talked, he began shaking his head harder and harder. This conversation was the worry he’d had in the back of his head from the moment he brought Katie back from the hospital, even from the first moments he’d thought of proposing to Beatrice. She came with the farm and he knew that. And as a teenager, he thought it could work if he could only work hard enough. He could give up his plans of barbering, for the time being, it wasn’t even a sure thing and step into a family business, find his place and earn an honest living.
He looked up. He hadn’t realized she had stopped talking, waiting for him to respond. He felt the familiar pit in his stomach open up, swallowing everything, leaving him with an empty shell and white noise running through his brain. It didn’t matter anymore. There was no way out.
“From how I see it, there is no easy solution,” he said.
“From how you see it, there are no solutions,” she shot back. “You never wanted this to work in the first place.” It was harsh, they both knew it. Adam saw her right hand close tightly around the wrist of her left as if holding it back from reaching out to him. She sat too tall and too stiff.
“Maybe there are no solutions,” Adam said quietly, picking at the label of his now-empty bottle. “Maybe you like to ignore the fact that the math never works out. That we’ve been borrowing and borrowing on this land, on the idea that it’ll go back to what it used to be. And maybe it never was what you think it was. Your parents and their simple, perfect, American dream life. Mom in the kitchen and Dad out running the family business, bringing home the bacon. Ignoring his gambling and her drinking and how that was the only way they could get through the day without strangling each other. I saw it when we first got married, but I didn’t say anything. So now it’s my fault, right? Or if I had said something then I’m not offering solutions, only pointing out problems. I can’t win. I might not know a lot about this life but I know what I saw and it wasn’t working, it hadn’t been working for years, and it’s not working now.”
Beatrice was frozen. Her head was high and she wasn’t looking at him but he could still see the tears beginning to form in her eyes. As he talked, his shoulders had straightened for the first time that evening, but now he let them fall again.
“I’m going to go check on the girls,” she said, her voice shaky. He nodded, studying the grain in the table, letting her leave without watching her just in case the tears started to fall. She hated crying in front of people.
He heard the creak of the loose floorboard outside their bedroom - he needed to fix that - then the sound of a door clicking shut. His eyes stayed on the table, the raised grain of the oak blurring. Years ago he thought they could work it out. They’d be able to rehabilitate the farm after her parents had retired, get it running smoothly, then he could go back to school. He’d dreamed of setting up a barbershop in the old barn on the west edge of the property, cutting hair while his kids helped out on the farm. He blinked hard, raising his head to stare at the pictures of the girls on the mantel. His favorite was on the far left. Katie had just finished her bridging ceremony from a Daisy to a Brownie, one step away from a real live Girl Scout, as she had put it. Ellie had insisted on wearing Katie’s old Daisy smock. She stood next to her sister, grinning with lopsided pigtails, as Katie tried to look as grown-up as possible.
Then his eyes began to drift upwards without his consent. They landed on the shotgun his father-in-law had mounted above the fireplace. He’d always joked that it was for bears and bankers and he’d never seen a bear. Beatrice kept the shells in her bedside table. He’d only held it a few times when she’d insisted he learned how to shoot. The wood of the stock was smooth and heavy. When he’d first pulled the trigger, the hit to his shoulder caught him off guard, the barrel flipping up and spraying shot across the field in front of him, barely hitting the tin can on the hay bale 30 feet away. Beatrice had laughed and said it was a good thing he didn’t need to aim for it to work.
The first time they looked at the farm’s finances together, really looked, was the first time he felt that feeling of the gun in his hands itching at the back of his brain. After hours of poring through her father’s leather portfolio, Beatrice had suggested selling land for the first time. She wanted him to be able to follow his dream too, even if it had to be delayed a few years. He’d said it was crazy, they could make it out of the hole they inherited, he could sock away money for an apprenticeship, they could make it work and he didn’t mind waiting. The next month when it was time to look at the numbers, he’d brought home his first six-pack. That kept the memory of that smooth wood at bay. Fifteen years later, it was impossible to ignore. The only thing he could hope for now was to dull it a bit.
“They’re asleep, or pretending to be at least.” He jumped, eyes snapping to his wife standing at the bottom of the stairs. He loosened his grip on the church-key he didn’t realize he was squeezing. He opened the next bottle and put the key on the table, rubbing the red and white lines that cut across his palm.
“Katie will still be up,” he said, finally standing and sweeping the papers into a pile. “These are big decisions for one night. We can make it through this month with the money from the corn and cross the next bridge when we come to it.”
“Are we going to be okay?” she asked, still standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said, crossing to her and pulling her into a hug. Her eyes were red. “You go on upstairs, it’s been a long night. I’ll lock up and join you in a minute.”
“Yeah, alright,” she said, squeezing his hand and giving him a small smile.
Adam walked slowly to the front door. He turned the thick deadlock and tucked Ellie’s boots under the rack so Beatrice didn’t trip over them tomorrow morning. He grabbed the folder and the empty husk of the six-pack. The folder went back into the cabinet above the coffee maker; the beer bottles went into the recycling under the sink. Final drink in hand, he stood in the middle of the room, sparing one final glance toward the mount above the mantel. Not tonight. He could hang on for another month. They still needed him. He turned the lights out and followed his wife upstairs.
Emily Hobby is an emerging author who recently graduated and relocated to the Pacific Northwest. She has been published in literary journals from her home state of Maryland and looks forward to exploring and learning about the community in Washington.