I wanted to be near those children. I did not want to be owned by the arrangement.
But I’d have traded the swing and the violets and both keys for five minutes of Sadie on my lap. I knew it. And that made it a very long ten days.
What got me through was a shoebox.
I went into Brandt’s on the second day for sunflower seed. Mr. Brandt was standing at the counter with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and about two hundred slips of paper spread out in front of him. Invoices. Charge tickets. A bank statement with a coffee ring on it.
“Lois did all this,” he said. He wasn’t really talking to me. Lois was his wife. She passed four years ago. “Forty-three years she did it, and I never once asked her how. Now the accountant in Kearney wants the third quarter by the fifteenth, and I can’t tell you if Don Swanson has paid for his creep feed since May.”
