The upstairs worked.
I didn’t know if it would. Seven people in a farmhouse with one and a half bathrooms. But it did.
Dale put Brody on hog chores after school. Ten dollars a day.
Our barns are shower-in, shower-out. For biosecurity. So every afternoon, Brody went through the shower, put on the barn clothes, and walked the alleys with Dale. Checking waterers. Checking feeders. Pulling out any pig that looked sick or off its feed.
Then he’d shower out again and come in for supper smelling like Dial soap.
And hog anyway.
The first week, Brody barely said a word at supper.
By the third week, he was telling all of us which pen had a pig that wouldn’t come up to the feeder. And what Dale thought was wrong with it. And what Brody thought was wrong with it, which was sometimes different.
“He’s a good hand,” Dale told me one night in bed. “Better than I was at twelve.”
From Dale, that’s a parade.
Hannah taught Kenzie to braid. They practiced on each other every single night after supper, at the kitchen table, with a jar of hair ties between them.
By April, Kenzie could do a French braid on herself without a mirror.
By May, she was doing mine every morning before I left for the route.
Cole and Pickles both survived. Cole discovered the barn cats and named every single one of them after a different kind of pie. Pecan. Cherry. Rhubarb. Lemon Meringue. The big gray tom was Banana Cream.
The kitchen got loud. There were boots everywhere. Six pairs by the back door at any given time. The water heater ran out of hot water every morning. I started buying milk two gallons at a time, and it still wasn’t enough.
Some nights, I wanted to go lock myself in my pickup out in the yard and just sit there in the quiet.
But other nights, at the end of supper, I’d look down that crowded table at seven people and a fishbowl.
And I’d think about Great-Grandpa Kirchner building this house in 1912. With four bedrooms upstairs.
Because he expected to fill them.
Jeff insisted on paying. We argued about it for a whole week.
Finally, I told him: four hundred dollars a month for groceries and propane. Not one penny more. And he could put the rest away in the bank.
He put the rest away. Every single paycheck.
He works in agronomy at the co-op. That spring, during planting season, he ran the sprayer fourteen hours a day. He’d come home at nine at night with his eyes red from the dust. And he’d go straight upstairs to read to Cole.
The same dinosaur book. Every night. Cole made him do the voices.
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