The Waitress Who Bought My Dad’s Coffee in 1998 Just Called About the Farm

Part 3: The North Field

I didn’t read them all that night. I couldn’t.

I read the top one. It was addressed to nobody. It said:

*January 14. Told Dr. Bhatia I don’t want the surgery. He argued. I said I’d think about it. I won’t. Ellie is coming for her birthday next month. I want to tell her about the farm before then but I don’t know how. I keep thinking about the girl at the Sunrise Diner. Ruth. She wrote me again last week. She’s doing so well. I wonder if that’s the only real thing I ever did.*

I put the napkin down.

I did not come for my birthday. I had called and said work was insane and could we do it over FaceTime, and he had said of course honey, don’t worry about it, and three weeks later he was dead in the hospital in Waterloo of a heart attack the surgery might have prevented.

I read four more napkins that night, from different years, and then I put the box on the kitchen table and I went upstairs to the bedroom that had been mine and I lay on the twin bed in my clothes and I stared at the ceiling until it got light.

In the morning I called Daniel.

“I don’t know when I’m coming home,” I said.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Okay. Are you all right?”

“No. But I will be. I need a week. Maybe two.”

“Ellie. Take what you need.”

I loved him for that. I did. But I could hear something in his voice, something I had been hearing for a while, and I knew that whatever I decided about the farm was going to decide something about Daniel too, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

I hung up and I drove to the lawyer’s office in Cedar Rapids.

His name was Mr. Purvis. He was seventy years old and wore a bow tie and had known my father since the co-op board days. He slid a manila envelope across the desk. It was sealed with my father’s handwriting on the front: *ELEANOR, IF SHE STAYS.*

“I can’t open this for you,” he said, “and you can’t open it unless you’ve made the decision. Those were his instructions. He was very specific.”

“Mr. Purvis, can I ask you something.”

“Of course.”

“Did he tell you why he did it this way.”

The old man took his glasses off. He rubbed his eyes. He put the glasses back on.

“He told me he had spent forty-one years being the reason you didn’t come home. He said he wasn’t going to be the reason one more time.”

I drove back to Cedar Falls the long way. Past the Sunrise Diner in Waverly, which was closed now and had a For Lease sign in the window. Past the hospital in Waterloo. Past the co-op. Past the church where we had buried my mother in 2015 and my father six weeks ago.

I got to the farm at dusk. The wind had picked up. The north field was moving.

I walked out to the edge of it, past the machine shed where the old Deere was rusting because Dad hadn’t been able to afford the part it needed for eighteen months. Past the grain bin. Past the tree where my brother, the one who never got born, would have had a swing if things had gone differently.

I stood at the edge of the north field and I thought about Ruth Halvorsen in a diner in Waverly in 1998 with a black eye and thirty-one dollars, and I thought about my father sitting in her section for two hours because he had just been told his son wasn’t coming, and I thought about the two of them, strangers, keeping each other alive across twenty-seven years without either of them knowing it until the very end.

And I thought, I don’t know if I can farm this land. I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know if I’m strong enough or patient enough or if I even like it here.

But I knew I wasn’t ready to burn the envelope.

I drove into town and I ate dinner at the diner on Main and I called Ruth from the parking lot.

“I want to keep it,” I said. “I don’t know for how long. I don’t know if I’ll live here or lease it out or figure something else out. But I’m not selling. Not yet.”

“Okay, honey.”

“Ruth. Can I ask you something.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you really call me instead of just sending the letter.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“Because when I was nineteen years old and a stranger sat in my section and wrote a phone number on a napkin, nobody called me first to explain it. I opened that napkin cold. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. But it took me eleven years to understand what it was. I didn’t want it to take you eleven years.”

I sat in the car in the parking lot of the diner and I cried for a while. Not hard. Just steady.

Then I drove back to the farm and I sat at the kitchen table and I opened the envelope.

Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, torn from a spiral notebook, in my father’s slow careful print.

*Ellie. If you’re reading this, you decided to stay, or at least not to leave yet. Thank you. I know what it cost you.*

*I want to tell you three things.*

*One. The farm is not a rope. If you ever need to sell it, sell it. Ruth will help you. I told her to. You have my permission and my blessing and my request that you not feel guilty for one second.*

*Two. In the top drawer of my desk, under the tax folder, is a savings account book you don’t know about. I opened it in 1999 and I put money in it every month for twenty-six years. It was supposed to be for the grandkids. There aren’t any grandkids and that’s okay, honey, that was never something you owed me. The money is yours. Use it for anything. Use it to leave. Use it to stay. Use it for Daniel if he’s still the one. It is not the farm’s money. It has nothing to do with the land. It’s just yours.*

*Three. In April of 1998, I sat in a diner with a girl who had a black eye and I gave her a hundred dollars and a phone number and I drove home. On the way home I pulled over on Highway 218 and I sat in the truck for a long time. I was thirty-four years old and I had just lost a son and I did not know how I was going to keep living. And I thought, if that girl calls the house, I will have something to do tomorrow. I will have to figure out where she can sleep. I will have to find her a job. I will have to be a person tomorrow.*

*She never called. But I got up the next day anyway. And the day after that. And eventually your mother got pregnant with you and I got to be your dad, which was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I never told anyone about the girl in the diner because it felt like a small thing.*

*It wasn’t a small thing, Ellie. She kept me alive that night and I didn’t know it until she wrote me a letter twenty-five years later. That’s the part I want you to hear. You never know which thing is the small thing and which thing is the whole thing. So do the thing. Sit in the section. Buy the coffee. Write the number down.*

*I love you. I always did. I was not good at saying it but I was good at meaning it.*

*Dad.*

I read it twice. Then I put it down on the table next to the wooden box of napkins and I went to the desk in the living room and I found the savings account book under the tax folder exactly where he said it would be.

There was $71,400 in the account.

I sat down on the floor of the living room and I laughed until I was crying and then I called Daniel.

I didn’t tell him about the money. I told him about Ruth and the diner and the napkin and the son who didn’t get born. I talked for an hour. He listened. When I was done he said, “Ellie. Do you want me to come out there.”

I said, “I don’t know yet.”

He said, “That’s okay. Tell me when you know.”

We hung up. I don’t know if we’re going to make it. I really don’t. But I know we’re both still trying, and some weeks that’s the thing.

—

I’ve been on the farm for four months now.

I haven’t moved out here. My apartment in Chicago is still mine and Miso is still there and Daniel feeds him on the weeks I’m not in. I come out to Cedar Falls every other week, sometimes for a long weekend, sometimes for ten days. I leased the north field to a neighbor named Bud Kellerman who is going to plant it in soybeans this year and split the crop with me. I didn’t fix the Deere. It’s still rusting in the machine shed. I might fix it next year. I might not.

I have not read all the napkins yet. I read one every Sunday morning with coffee. There are enough to last me most of a year and I’m in no hurry.

Ruth came by in April. She brought her husband Pete and the two greyhounds and a coffee cake her mother used to make. We sat on the porch and watched the field. She didn’t stay long. Before she left she stood in the driveway and looked at the house for a minute and she said, “He built this.”

I said, “He did.”

She said, “It’s a good house, Ellie.”

Then she got in her car and drove away and I stood in the driveway watching her taillights and I thought about the napkin in her wallet for eleven years.

Last week I was cleaning out the hall closet and I found a stack of my father’s old work shirts, the brown Carhartt kind, folded on the top shelf. I took one down. In the chest pocket, folded small, was a paper napkin.

It was blank.

He must have carried it for years. Just in case.

I put it in my wallet.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the farm long-term. I don’t know if I’m going to marry Daniel or if Miso will ever forgive me for the weeks I’m gone or if I’ll wake up one morning at fifty and realize I should have sold the land in February and never looked back.

But I know that on a Tuesday in April of 1998, my father sat down in a stranger’s section and did the one thing he could fix that day.

And I know that the stranger grew up and grew old and bought back the note on his farm and called his daughter on a February morning and forgave a debt he never told anyone about.

And I know that somewhere in between those two Tuesdays, I got to exist. And I got a father who was quiet and stubborn and not good at saying it but good at meaning it. And I got a napkin in my wallet, folded small, blank, waiting.

Just in case.