We drove home in silence.
Nate’s truck is a 2006 Ford F-150 with a cracked windshield and a heater that only works on high. We bounced along the gravel roads, past fields still brown from the winter, the radio off.
About halfway home, Nate finally spoke.
“How much money do we have saved?”
I didn’t have to look it up. I’m the one who keeps track. I work in insurance billing at Corwin Regional Medical Center. Numbers are my whole day.
“Six thousand two hundred dollars. In the savings account at First Farmers.”
He nodded slowly. Watched the road.
“Then we’ll have to make more,” he said. “I’ll start taking extra harvest repair jobs. Nights. Weekends. Whatever comes in.”
“And I’ll pick up shifts at the diner,” I said.
He reached over and took my hand on the bench seat.
Neither of us said anything about the card.
When we got home, he took it out of his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and looked at it for a long time at the kitchen table.
Then he put it in the drawer by the stove where we keep the rubber bands and the batteries.
He didn’t throw it away. I noticed that.
Here is what the next two years looked like.
Monday through Friday, from eight to four-thirty, I sat in a gray cubicle in the basement of Corwin Regional, processing insurance claims. Medicare. Medicaid. Blue Cross. Supplemental plans. I fought with insurance companies on the phone about denied surgeries and miscoded X-rays and billing errors that made old people cry.
Every Friday and Saturday night, and every Sunday morning, I waited tables at the Big Rig Diner, a truck stop out on Highway 30. I wore a brown polyester apron with a little pocket for tips. I carried plates of chicken-fried steak and hash browns to truckers from Nebraska and Ohio and Texas. I learned which ones tipped in cash and which ones left you a quarter and a religious pamphlet.
Nate spent his evenings in other people’s machine sheds, fixing combines and tractors and grain dryers. In the fall, during harvest, he’d come home at two in the morning smelling like hydraulic fluid and fall asleep with his boots still on.
In June, he sold his fishing boat.
It was a little sixteen-foot aluminum boat with a forty-horse Mercury motor. His grandfather, Opal’s husband, had left it to him. Nate had taken it out on Saylorville Lake every summer Saturday since he was nineteen.
A man from Ankeny bought it for $4,800 cash.
Nate watched him tow it away from the end of our driveway, his hands in his pockets.
“Grandpa would understand,” he said.
I wasn’t sure Grandpa would. But I didn’t say so.
We ate a lot of eggs.
Scrambled eggs. Fried eggs. Egg salad sandwiches. Egg casserole with leftover potatoes. A woman at church raised chickens and sold us eggs for two dollars a dozen. We bought four dozen a week.
We stopped going out to eat. We canceled the TV. I cut Nate’s hair in the kitchen with a pair of clippers from Walmart. He looked a little lopsided for most of that year. He said he didn’t care.
We didn’t tell anyone.
Not Ron and Judy. Not Kim or Jeff or Stacy. Not even my own mother in Des Moines.
It wasn’t pride, exactly. It was something harder to explain.
If we told the family we were struggling, it would sound like we were asking for money. It would sound like we were saying, Why didn’t you give us twenty thousand dollars too?
We were never going to say that.
We were the capable ones, after all.
At family dinners, we listened.
Kim and Doug bought a three-bedroom ranch in Ankeny. Jeff and Brittany bought a two-story in a new subdivision outside Ames, with a three-car garage. Stacy bought a little bungalow in Ames with a sunroom and a pink front door.
At Thanksgiving, everyone passed around their phones with pictures of granite countertops and new carpet.
“And how about you two?” Judy asked me, passing the cranberry sauce. “Still in that little rental on Second Street?”
“Still there,” I said.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll get there someday. You’re so capable.”
Nate’s ears turned red.
I passed the stuffing.
By the second spring, our savings account at First Farmers & Merchants Bank had $43,186.40 in it.
I kept a spreadsheet. Every dollar. Every tip. Every harvest job. The boat money. My diner wages. Nate’s overtime.
I knew it wasn’t enough for a regular house. Not even close. The cheapest houses in Corwin were selling for a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty thousand. With what we had, we could make a down payment. But our monthly mortgage would eat us alive.
Then, in March, I was reading the Corwin Courier on my lunch break.
I was flipping past the obituaries toward the crossword when I saw it. In the legal notices section, in tiny gray print.
NOTICE OF PUBLIC TAX SALE. Delphi County Treasurer. The following real property will be offered at public auction for delinquent property taxes on Monday, April 14th, at 10:00 a.m., on the steps of the Delphi County Courthouse…
There were seven properties listed. Six were empty lots.
One was a house.
Parcel #14-22-300-007. Former Miller property. 4182 Old Mill Road. Approx. 2.3 acres with dwelling. Delinquent taxes, penalties and costs: $9,214.63.
I knew the Miller place. Everybody in Corwin knew it. It sat on a little rise off Old Mill Road, about six miles outside town. A two-story white farmhouse with a big front porch and a red barn behind it, slowly falling in.
Nobody had lived there in six years. Not since old Walt Miller died. Somebody said he’d had no family left. Somebody said his estate never went through probate, and the taxes just stopped getting paid.
I tore the notice out of the paper and put it in my apron pocket.
We drove out to look at it that Saturday.
The front porch was sinking at one corner like a tired horse. The yard was full of waist-high weeds and thistles. Three of the upstairs windows were cracked. A family of raccoons had clearly been living in the barn.
Nate parked the truck on the gravel drive and got out.
He walked all the way around the outside of the house. Twice. He crouched down and looked at the foundation. He knocked on the siding with his knuckles. He looked up at the roofline for a long time, squinting.
He got down on his back in the weeds and slid under the edge of the porch and stayed under there so long I started to worry.
Finally he came back out, brushing dirt off his jeans.
“The foundation’s limestone,” he said. “Somebody built this thing right. The sills are good. The roof needs to come off, and the wiring’s probably from the forties, and God knows what the plumbing looks like. But the bones are solid.”
“Nate. Look at it.”
“I am looking at it,” he said. “I’m looking at it like a combine with a blown engine. The frame’s good. Everything else, you just fix.”
He turned around and looked at me.
“I can fix this, Callie.”
The auction took place on the courthouse steps at ten in the morning on April 14th.
It was cold and windy. About twenty people showed up. Some were just curious. Some were farmers looking at the empty lots next to their fields. A man from the Courier was there taking pictures.
And there was one man who was clearly there for the Miller house.
He was about fifty, in a padded green vest over a pressed button-down shirt, with expensive sunglasses pushed up on his head. He had a leather folder and a phone he kept checking. He drove a black Silverado with a magnetic sign on the door: HEARTLAND PROPERTY SOLUTIONS — WE BUY HOUSES.
The auctioneer was a man named Dobbs. Everybody in the county knew Dobbs. He was seventy-something, bald, with a voice like a cattle auction, which is what he’d done for forty years before he retired and the county hired him for tax sales.
He read the parcel number off a clipboard.
“Now, folks, we’re gonna start the Miller place at the amount of taxes and costs owed. Nine thousand two hundred fourteen dollars and sixty-three cents. Do I hear nine-two?”
The man in the padded vest raised one finger.
“Nine-two! Do I hear ten?”
Nate raised his hand.
“Ten! Do I hear fifteen?”
The investor raised his finger again. He didn’t even look at us.
It went fast after that. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. Thirty. The investor raised his finger every time without hesitating. Nate raised his hand every time without looking at me.
At thirty-five, the investor glanced over at us for the first time. He looked at Nate’s work jacket. At my diner sneakers. He smiled a little. Not a nice smile.
“Thirty-eight,” he said.
“Forty,” said Nate.
“Forty-one.”
The crowd went quiet. People were looking at us now.
I squeezed Nate’s arm. We had talked about this the night before, at the kitchen table, over egg salad sandwiches. Our absolute limit was $42,000. That would leave us with almost nothing for repairs. Anything more, and we’d have to walk away.
Nate took a breath.
“Forty-one thousand five hundred,” he called.
The investor looked at him for a long moment. Then down at his phone. Then back at us.
He shook his head and stepped back.
Dobbs looked around the crowd.
“Forty-one five, going once. Forty-one five, going twice.”
He banged his little wooden gavel on the courthouse railing.
“Sold! To the young couple in the Carhartt.”
