We did not discuss the Easter dinner again that evening.
Nate changed out of his good shirt and went into the garage.
I put away the leftover food, washed the dishes, and folded the bluebird card into the pocket of my purse.
I could have thrown it into the kitchen trash.
Instead, I kept it.
I told myself I was saving it because Judy had meant well.
Looking back, I know that was only part of the truth.
I wanted something I could point to if I ever needed to explain why the afternoon had hurt.
The card was proof that nothing had been forgotten.
We had been included.
We had been given something.
It simply wasn't what the others had received.
That distinction mattered to me more than I wanted to admit.
The next morning, life returned to its ordinary schedule.
I worked in the insurance billing department at the hospital.
Most days, I spent hours checking claims, correcting codes, calling providers, and trying to make sense of paperwork that seemed designed to confuse people.
It was steady work.
The pay was decent enough to cover our basic expenses.
But there was rarely much left at the end of the month.
Our rented house was small.
The kitchen floor had a loose corner near the refrigerator.
The bedroom windows rattled when the wind came from the north.
The bathroom faucet dripped unless I turned the handle hard enough to make my wrist ache.
None of it was terrible.
That was the problem.
We were never desperate enough to qualify for help, but we were not comfortable enough to stop worrying about money.
Every unexpected expense mattered.
A new tire could ruin a week's budget.
A doctor's bill could empty the little cushion we had built.
And saving for a house seemed to require more patience than either of us possessed.
Still, we had a number.
Six thousand two hundred dollars.
It was not enough to buy much of anything.
But it was ours.
A few days after Easter, Nate sat at our kitchen table with a yellow notepad and a pencil.
He had written our monthly expenses in a column.
Rent.
Utilities.
Groceries.
Fuel.
Insurance.
He had even included the small amount we spent on coffee when one of us had an especially long day.
I sat across from him with a cup of tea.
"How much can we save each month?" I asked.
He moved the pencil down the page.
"If nothing goes wrong, maybe four hundred."
"Four hundred isn't much."
"No."
He did not pretend otherwise.
We both knew that saving four hundred dollars at a time would take years.
And that was assuming our rent stayed the same, the car kept running, and neither of us needed anything expensive.
Nate tapped the pencil against the paper.
"I can take more repair work."
He already repaired farm equipment after his regular shifts when somebody needed help.
He was good with engines.
He could hear a problem before most people had even opened the hood.
Farmers trusted him because he did not pretend to know things he didn't know.
If he said a machine could be fixed, he usually found a way.
Extra work meant longer evenings, though.
Sometimes he came home with grease under his fingernails and a dark mark across his forehead.
He would wash his hands twice and still leave faint black smudges on the towel.
I hated the thought of him working even more hours.
But I hated the thought of spending our lives waiting for something to change even more.
"I can pick up more shifts," I said.
He looked at me.
"You already work enough."
"I can manage."
He started to object.
Then he stopped.
That was how our decisions often happened.
Neither of us wanted to make the other carry more.
Neither of us wanted to be the person who said no when the other was trying to build a better life.
The following week, I spoke to the manager at the highway truck stop.
I had worked there before, and they remembered me.
The job was simple in theory.
Take orders.
Refill coffee.
Carry plates.
Wipe tables.
Keep moving.
In practice, it meant standing for hours while truck drivers came and went, some tired, some impatient, and some grateful for a hot meal after a long stretch on the road.
I agreed to work Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
My hospital job paid the bills.
The truck stop shifts would help us save.
At first, I thought the schedule would be manageable.
Then Friday night arrived.
I finished my hospital shift, drove home, changed my clothes, and headed back out.
By midnight, my feet hurt.
By two in the morning, the smell of fried food had settled into my hair.
I came home after sunrise, slept for a few hours, and did it again the next night.
Sunday mornings were harder.
I would stand behind the counter while sunlight came through the windows, feeling as if my body had forgotten what day it was.
Customers asked for coffee.
Plates clattered.
The kitchen bell rang.
I kept moving.
Every tip went into a separate envelope when I got home.
I wrote the date on the front.
Then I put the envelope in the drawer where we kept our household papers.
It was not a large amount at first.
A few dollars here.
Ten dollars there.
Sometimes a generous customer left enough to make the shift feel worthwhile.
Sometimes I worked for hours and went home with barely anything extra.
I kept doing it.
Nate kept taking repair jobs.
He worked on tractors, combines, and whatever else farmers brought him.
Some jobs were simple.
Others required him to crawl beneath a machine in the cold, searching for the part that had failed.
He came home later and later.
We started eating dinner at different times.
If I was working at the truck stop, I left food covered on the stove.
If he was still repairing equipment when I got home, I reheated whatever remained.
We stopped buying things just because we wanted them.
New clothes could wait.
A meal out could wait.
The television that sometimes lost its picture could wait.
We began looking at grocery prices before looking at the food itself.
Eggs became one of our regular meals.
Scrambled eggs for dinner.
Egg sandwiches before work.
Boiled eggs packed into small containers when we needed something cheap to take with us.
I learned how many ways there were to prepare the same ingredients.
Nate never complained.
That was both a comfort and a problem.
Sometimes I wanted him to admit he was tired.
Sometimes I wanted him to say he was angry about Easter.
But he kept the card in his shirt pocket for several days before finally moving it into the drawer with our papers.
He never threw it away.
I did not ask why.
We had made a decision without announcing it.
We would not ask his parents for money.
We would not tell his siblings how hard we were working.
We would not explain our finances at family gatherings.
If someone asked how things were going, we would say we were fine.
It was partly pride.
It was partly fear.
I worried that if we told the family we were struggling, they would think we were asking for a share of the money.
I did not want to stand in the same room as Kim and Jeff and feel as if I had to justify wanting what they had been given.
And I did not want Nate to feel that he had failed.
One evening, he came home carrying a folded newspaper.
He placed it on the table and sat down.
"I've been thinking about the boat."
I stopped drying a plate.
His fishing boat was old, but he loved it.
He had bought it years before we met, saving money from repair jobs and doing most of the maintenance himself.
It was not fancy.
The paint had faded, and one of the seats had a tear.
But on the rare weekends when he had time to use it, he came home looking lighter.
"What about it?" I asked.
"I could sell it."
I put the plate down.
"You don't have to do that."
"We need the money more than I need the boat right now."
He said it plainly.
No dramatic speech.
No attempt to make the sacrifice sound noble.
I looked at his hands resting on the newspaper.
There were small cuts across his knuckles.
A dark line of grease remained beneath one fingernail.
"Are you sure?"
He nodded.
"I am."
I wanted to tell him that we could wait another year.
I wanted to say that a house was not worth giving up every good thing in our lives.
But I also knew how much he wanted a place that belonged to us.
Somewhere we could repair things without asking permission.
Somewhere we could paint a wall without worrying about losing our security deposit.
Somewhere we could plant a tree and know we would still be there when it grew.
So I sat beside him.
"Then we'll sell it."
He reached for my hand.
We did not talk about what his parents had given the others.
We did not need to.
The money from the boat went into our savings.
The envelopes from the truck stop went in beside it.
Nate's extra repair money followed.
Weeks became months.
The number in our account grew slowly, then a little faster.
We still had setbacks.
The car needed repairs.
Our rent went up.
One month, I missed several truck stop shifts because the hospital needed me to stay late.
But we kept going.
By the end of the first year, we had learned how to live without expecting much.
We could make a meal from almost nothing.
We could stretch a paycheck.
We could turn down invitations that would cost money without explaining ourselves.
And we could look at a bank statement without immediately feeling defeated.
We were tired.
We were also closer to our goal.
The bluebird card remained in the drawer.
I rarely looked at it, but I knew exactly where it was.
Sometimes, when I opened the drawer to find a bill or a receipt, I saw the pale envelope beneath the household papers.
I would close the drawer again.
I told myself I had moved on.
I told myself the money had never been ours to begin with.
Both statements were true.
Neither made the memory disappear.
One evening, Nate came home from a repair job and placed his latest pay envelope on the table.
Then he pulled out the yellow notepad.
He wrote down the new total.
I leaned over his shoulder.
For the first time, the number looked like something we could build on.
Nate drew a small line beneath it.
"We're getting there," he said.
I looked at the figure for a long time.
We still had a long way to go.
But for the first time since Easter, I felt something stronger than embarrassment.
Hope.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: The Old Miller House Had Been Empty for Six Years, and Nobody at the Auction Seemed to Want It as Much as We Did
Three Envelopes Held Twenty Thousand Dollars Each, While the Card Beneath My Plate Told Me Everything About My Place in the Family
Part 2 of 13
