Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (16 page)

“That’s why I chose him,” Luke says. “I don’t have any clean ones.”

I still have plenty of the laundry detergent from the box of domestic supplies my mother gave me for Christmas. Just no strength to do any laundry.

The boys ask no one for help. The Link motto of accountability, of dobbers up, head down, soldier on, has obviously been passed down to them. By late Monday, a full week into my flu, the three of them can’t keep us going alone any longer, and Owen wakes me up in the middle of the night.

“Mom,” he says, pressing his hand on my arm. I feel his presence,
but am slow on the uptake. “Mom!” he says again, shaking me now.

I wake up thinking,
Is something on fire? Did the horses get out? Burglar?

These are just sleep-drugged worries that have no truck with reality. There is no fire; there are no horses, not anymore; and burglar—are you kidding me? What do we have to steal? Not a darn thing. Rifling through these thoughts, I finally make sleepy eye contact with my oldest.

“We’re out of food,” he says.

I can’t figure out why Owen wants to eat in the middle of the night. I look at the clock. It’s not the middle of the night after all, it’s only 8:30 in the evening. It just feels like the middle of the night because it’s dark outside and I’ve lost all sense of time. My arms and legs feel like lake-sunk trees, my head a stuffy, waterlogged bowling ball sunk in sheets awash in my own chilly sweat.

At least the fever broke. The smell makes me think that maybe I can do laundry, after all.

“We’re out of milk, we don’t have any cereal or cheese or apples or anything,” he tells me.

“Nothing?” I mumble through chapped lips.

He shakes his head.

“When did you guys eat?”

“At school, and then when we got home we had macaroni and cheese. I microwaved it.”

“Hungry?” I ask. He nods.

Owen sits down on the edge of the bed and waits while I gather my resolve, which takes a long time considering there’s not too much of it to round up.

“I can drive if you guys can shop,” I tell him.

Help
, I think.
I need some help
.

But I make it to the driver’s seat of our van with my winter coat and boots slipped on over my sour-smelling pajamas. The fever is definitely gone, so are the earaches and the sore throat, I’m just weak. In my coat pocket is our last sixty-five dollars. I won’t get paid for another ten days and not at all if I don’t start churning out some work. That sixty-five dollars has to last us until then.

I don’t want to waste any energy making a list, so on the drive to the grocery store I tell my sons what to buy and Owen writes it down.

A gallon of 2 percent milk.

Two boxes of cereal, their choice.

Fruit, yogurt, juice.

A can of lentil soup, I think I could eat that.

Peanut butter, cheese, eggs, tortillas, hummus.

Maybe some more Fritos, if there’s enough money.

Owen is sitting in the passenger seat, and I put the money in his hand. “Don’t go over, because this is all we’ve got,” I tell him weakly. He nods.

He can’t come back to the van to get more money, because we don’t have any more. I can’t just write a check if he goes over, because it will bounce. I can’t transfer money from savings to checking, because there is no savings.

I park right in front of the store, driving over the words “No Parking—Fire Lane,” and turn off the ignition to save gas. Just driving here has exhausted me, and I hope I’ll have enough energy to get us home. Owen doesn’t have his license yet and isn’t supposed to drive with just his temporary permit after dark.

“I’ll be right here,” I say to Owen, then turn to Luke and Will in the backseat. “Boys, listen to your brother. He’s in charge.
No arguing in the store, no goofing around. Say thank you to the cashier. Don’t forget.”

“It’ll be good, Mom,” Owen reassures me as they all three solemnly exit the van. “It’ll be fine.”

The grocery store has large glass windows all along the front, and I watch as Owen gets a shopping cart and his brothers take their posts, one at each of his shoulders.

They’ve shopped with me many times before, all three of them, and I’ve sent the two older boys into the corner store together to pick up one or two items while I wait in the minivan, but I’ve never asked them to do this. I’ve never asked them to shop like adults—to go through the whole store with a cart and a set amount of money and select several days’ worth of groceries all alone, and then to pay for them and carry them out of the store and load them in the van by themselves.

I know that my SMILE handbook lists the top five ways that parents can help their children adjust to divorce, because I’ve practically memorized them by now. This is number one: “A parent should not depend on their children for emotional support. Children need to be children.”

I
so
want to be that mother, the one SMILE holds out as the ideal. Yet often, like now, I find myself doing the exact opposite of her, and I know it.

Over the next half hour the car grows cold and I ache and shiver as I catch glimpses of my trio inside the store, making their way from aisle to aisle. Children may need to be children, but in these brief sightings, they don’t look like children to me anymore, they look like small, skinny adults. Something in the way they hold themselves. The way they walk straight ahead, no wiggling, no wasted motion.

I’ve been sick for eight days, and at some point during each one of those I asked for help, but I’ve asked for it mostly silently, so no one can hear me. Twice, though, I’ve asked for it out loud.

I called a friend and told her I was sick and probably dehydrated and she drove over and left a two-liter of 7Up on my front porch but didn’t come inside—she has small children of her own, one just two years old, and didn’t want them to get sick, too.

I called a doctor, but it was on the weekend, he was an on-call physician and not my regular doctor, and he chastised me a good one for waiting too long to ask for help. He was sure I had a new and particularly severe strain of flu, but it was too late for him to do anything for me. If I’d called sooner, then maybe he could have helped. “Now,” he tells me, in a sovereign tone, “you’re just going to have to suffer through.”

Tell me something I don’t know, Ass-munch
.

There is no one else. My friend Beverly is gone on a mission trip to Africa, so I can’t call her to come help us. Another friend, Linda, is working 24/7, plus she doesn’t drive in the winter anymore, after a harrowing near miss with a snowplow. My parents live 150 miles away. My brother and his new girlfriend are who knows where, doing who knows what. I don’t have many neighbors, and the few I do have I either don’t know or don’t like.

And then, this final realization hits me hard: for all my spiritual searching over the past several months through a mysterious Eastern religion, looking for some fuzzy thing I’ve been thinking of as my divine nature, we don’t even have a regular old midwestern Protestant church with a real building and real people to go to and ask for real help.

It occurs to me too, watching my boys push the half-full shopping cart up to the cashier’s lane and load each item onto the
conveyor belt, that they’re not much for asking for help, either. Not a one of them. This, I know from my own stubborn self, will yield both rewards and consequences in their grown-up lives. And there’s probably nothing I can do to spare them the latter. No one could have spared me.

The grocery store’s automatic air lock door swooshes open, I turn the minivan’s engine back on, and out come my sons, my heroes, small, medium, and large, loaded down with bags of provisions. In an evenly spaced line all three totter under their burdens single-file, past the front of the minivan, jogging through my headlight beams.

I have this piece of a memory then. Once a long time ago, before kids, before a husband, I drove into the parking lot of an apartment complex at night, my headlights sweeping over parked cars, snowed-over front steps, and lighted windows with the drapes closed. I don’t even remember where it was or why I was there. Out from between two of the buildings came three adolescent raccoons tiptoeing through the night, treats in their humanoid front paws no doubt pilfered from a nearby Dumpster. Snowdrifts shone, tiny stars lit the night, and the very air glittered in the cold. For a few quiet minutes no one but those raccoons and I were in the world.

I put the car in park and watched as the young furry bandits walked a few steps past my headlights single-file, little bodies up on their hind legs, black hands clutching the food to their chests. From around the corner of the building came the mother raccoon, sniffing the air and greeting each cub nose-to-nose. The four of them ate together right there in the cold starlight, then she took her place at the front of the line and led her brood off into some scraggly nearby woods and they disappeared from my sight.

Just a family, heading home, through the frozen dark.

I unlock the doors of the van and the boys climb inside, pulling their shopping bags in with them. Owen hands me a few dollar bills and some coins, then turns to face the backseat.

“Tell her,” he says to his brothers.

No response.

“Tell her!” Owen says again.

“We got cookies,” Luke confesses.

“Two bags,” Will adds. “Oreos.”

“I told them they weren’t on the list,” Owen says to me, apologetic.

The car goes silent, waiting for my reaction. We don’t buy store-bought cookies. If the boys want cookies, they have to do the work of making them from scratch. Peanut butter chocolate chip usually, with fork marks across the top, like paw prints.

“Cookies are cool,” I say in my very best Beavis voice. The boys all laugh. A laugh of silliness, but a laugh of relief, too. “Please hand me one, somebody, before I die of starvation.”

“Heh-heh—heh-heh-heh,” comes the trio’s reply.

They are all the help I need. And I feel a little bit better just thinking this thought. We pass no one on the drive back, and eat sugary store-bought cookies in the cold dark together as our minivan shoots home like a glittering missile.

We are okay, we are fine. I am fine. Mothers are mothers again and children are children. And it feels like there’s no one but the four of us in the world.

The groceries don’t last. The carrots packed in sawdust don’t last. Our firewood doesn’t last. Our money certainly doesn’t last, either. As if I needed any further proof that we are scraping bottom, I’m making Will’s sack lunch for school and have to mine the sides of the peanut butter jar just to get enough of the stuff to make him half a sandwich.

I hold up the spoon and stare at this glob of caramel-colored paste, looking for a sign. A week ago, our newspaper ran an interview with an Ohio man who said he saw the face of Jesus in his
pancake. I don’t see anything in our last spoonful of extra-crunchy, though.

Even if there were something (or Someone) there, would my cynical brain even allow my heart to see it?

The boys didn’t get sick but I’m still reeling a little from the flu. Still, we went to a tiny church last Sunday just down the road. Will read the sign on the door and announced this sudden realization: a god and a prince are one and the same. I smiled, thinking how meaningful it was going to be to pray alongside people from our own neighborhood and in the denomination—Lutheran—that I was raised within.

But instead of a friendly welcome, the Prince of Peace just barred me from taking communion, and right after an usher passed around the collection plate, too. Unless visitors would pledge membership on the spot, no wine and no wafer. This place didn’t feel like our church home after all, it felt more like the rural branch of a stodgy old bank. And our souls just got bounced.

“But Mom, that was just a
piece
of the Prince,” Will suggests, wincing at my loud tirade over religious dogma that I miraculously managed to stifle until the car ride home. “Now we just need to find the rest of him.”

At least one of us might be learning something valuable—forgiveness—on our continuing spiritual quest. I guess it shouldn’t matter if it’s not always me.

That plain old peanut butter jar probably divines our fortunes better than church rules or a hokey spiritual sign, anyway. And there is a reason the jar was empty. My grocery bill just went back up, because last week we suffered a loss.

“What’s that smell?” Owen had asked, the first one home from school.

“What smell?” My head was still congested, and so I didn’t smell anything.

“Like rotten flowers or something. I think it’s coming from the basement.”

It was.

While I was sick with that awful flu, the Big Valley lost power when a thick bludgeon of ice built up on a nearby power line. The electricity was out for only a few hours, not even long enough for what little food we had in our refrigerator to go bad, but long enough for our ancient chest freezer in the basement to die. When the power went back on, it didn’t.

In the past two weeks I’ve been getting stronger and getting my appetite back, but meat is the last thing I’ve wanted to eat, and it’s been vegetables and brown rice, farmer’s omelets and peanut butter toast. I can’t eat any pork yet, I can’t even stomach cooking it for the boys, so I’ve had no reason to go downstairs and lift the lid on the chest freezer.

Until now. Until the smell.

Owen and I approach the white coffin-shaped box with dread, open the top, and are blown back by the sweet, gagging stink of rotting pork. We look down, but it’s too late. A pinkish meat Kool-Aid has leaked out under the freezer and pooled. We’re standing in it.