Raymond set the phone on the counter and stared at it. Marcus had learned about the land deal before he learned about the pneumonia. The information had traveled through his colleague, not through family. Nora was sleeping on a couch four feet away, and Marcus was sending emails about acreage. Raymond opened the notebook. Under Marcus’s name, he wrote: Called about land deal. Found out about pneumonia mid-conversation. Did not offer to come.
That night, after Nora had gone to sleep, Raymond took Eileen’s journal from the shelf and turned to the entries he hadn’t read yet. He had been rationing them, a few pages at a time, afraid of running out of her voice. The entry he found was dated five years before her diagnosis.
Ray built the barn twice when it burned in ’94. He held Nora all night when she had the croup. He drove three hours in a blizzard to get Kevin from that party in college, but he never once told Marcus he was proud of him for leaving and building something on his own. He never went to Kevin’s baseball games. He never called Diane at college unless there was business to discuss. He loves them. I know he does, but he loves them the way the land loves rain, silently from underneath, in ways they cannot see. And children need to see it.
Raymond closed the journal. He sat in the dark trailer and listened to Nora breathing on the couch and felt the full weight of what Eileen had written settle onto him. The test he was running on his children was not the only test in this trailer. Eileen was running one on him from the grave, through the pages of her journal.
She was asking him to look at what he had built besides the farm, to look at the distances between himself and his children, and ask how many of those distances he had created. Marcus spoke in transactions because Raymond had taught him that language. Diane disappeared into her career because Raymond had shown her that work was more important than presence. Kevin came to him only when he needed money because Raymond had never offered anything else. Nora was different, but Nora had been raised by Eileen.
February and March passed slowly. Nora came every Saturday. The snow melted, then came again, then melted for good in late March when the fields turned to mud. Raymond recovered from the pneumonia, but the cold had settled into his joints, and on bad mornings it took him ten minutes to straighten his back after getting out of bed.
Kevin did not call. Tammy called Nora twice. The shop had closed in February. Kevin was working part-time at a parts store in Ames, making fourteen dollars an hour. Tyler had stopped going to school three days a week. Tammy’s voice was careful and measured on the phone, the voice of a woman holding things together by will alone.