Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (11 page)

Plus, I know that if he has to pay me that much money every month, he’ll ask for more time with our boys. I do want them to have a relationship with their father. I just don’t want to give up even one more minute with them than is absolutely necessary for that to happen.

And maybe this is all my fault. Maybe without me around, he
would
be able to move on, be happy, perk up. Maybe it’s
me
that’s been bringing him down and not those dipping serotonin levels.

“I’m good with that,” Mr. Wonderful says, grabbing the pen.

The fate of the farm will depend on what we can work out
with our lawyers. The property and the farmhouse will have to be appraised. If they’re sold, we’ll split the proceeds that remain after the mortgage is paid off. If I keep them, I’ll have to refinance and get a mortgage in my name only.

“We know a good realtor,” Mr. Wonderful says, putting down the pen, slapping his thighs with both hands, then standing up and shaking the social worker’s hand. He is still convinced that I’m going to sell the farm. He’s wrong.

I stand up, smooth my skirt, and smile at both of these men. I have my boys.
My
boys. I have to grit my teeth just to keep from yelling it out loud.

The boys eat cereal for breakfast at the kitchen counter on a chilly Saturday morning, wearing their winter coats over their pajamas. I can see my breath inside our house, and the gas bill reads, “Past Due Amount: $279.00.”

I’ve been so focused on feeding us over the winter that I haven’t given enough thought to how we’re going to stay warm. We have a perfectly good furnace; I thought we’d just use that—until I saw what heat costs. I should have listened to the Prognosticator.

When I was my sons’ ages, heat was never a problem. I remember being so warm as a girl. As if there were a tiny furnace inside of
me, generating just the right amount of heat in my body regardless of what the elements were doing outside of it.

There I am, decades ago in my burnt-orange bathing suit, diving off the end of my grandparents’ dock, over and over again.

The sun is starting to go down and all the other kids are on shore shivering. My brother and my cousins are trembling inside their beach towels, but mine sits folded on the dock and I don’t even feel the cold. The lake is mine.

I put my palms together, point them toward the dark and unknowable center of the earth, and dive. My arms are pale, freckled, stick-thin. But underwater, they are ablaze.

“C’mon, Mard,
right now
. It’s time to go up. It’s getting dark.”

My mother is only momentarily exasperated. She’s proud of me, I know, because she was a girl raised among boys too, once. She knows the singular joy of outlasting them. Of outswimming them, of outrunning them, of outthrowing them, and of hitting a baseball so hard they can’t catch it.

I pull myself onto the dock, stand up dripping, and my mother leads us on our walk up the steep hill to our grandparents’ house. I’m right behind her, pine needles sticking to the undersides of my bare feet. “Warm as bathwater,” I say over my shoulder to the shivering boys, my towel draped over my arm.

Soon enough the image is gone and I’m right back to our gas bill. “To Avoid Shutoff Send Payment Immediately.” And then the company tagline at the bottom of the bill: “Comfort and Efficiency for $3 a Day!” Only a couple of bucks for heat. That seems completely doable. And yet I have fallen behind even on this.

Our clothes dryer, our hot-water heater, and our ancient furnace all run on natural gas. I’ve set the furnace at fifty-five degrees; just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing. We can hang
clothes out on the line even in winter and they will eventually dry. I’ve encouraged the boys to take showers at school after gym class whenever they can. If we need hot water for other things, we can boil it on the electric stove, but we are going to need an alternate source for heat.

Please God, help me think of something
.

This should not be an insurmountable problem. Humans have been figuring out ways to keep themselves warm for thousands of years. I am an educated adult woman in possession of a perfectly good journalism degree, and I should be able to figure it out, too.

The three boys put their cereal bowls in the sink, put on their winter gloves, and head for the TV in the family room and Saturday-morning cartoons.

I burn the heat bill in the fireplace and watch the exclamation point turn to ash. Alternatives. I need alternatives and I need them now. The tiny furnace inside of me isn’t enough today, and even though my sons don’t complain, I know they are cold.

The worst part? It’s only the middle of November. Winter hasn’t even started yet.

By afternoon the sun is out and the temperature climbs to almost sixty degrees. If you don’t like Michigan’s weather, the saying goes, just wait a minute. And if I don’t like whatever problem is confronting me, I can just wait a minute for that to change, too. A new one is bound to be along shortly.

This is an unusually warm day for this late in the season, but not unheard of, and so I know it’s not an answer to my prayer, it’s just a temporary reprieve. Still, I might as well take advantage.

I open up all of the windows in the house, because it is actually
warmer outside than it is inside. The boys must be getting used to me doing things that go against convention, because while they watch me, and Will even runs to help, they don’t bother to comment.

I hear Will’s feet pound up the stairs and then the sound of the ancient double-hung windows creaking open in the upstairs bedrooms.

“Mom! There’s a butterfly stuck in here!” he yells from his room.

“Open the screen and let it out,” I answer back, without even thinking.

I have this sudden image then of my youngest son tumbling out of his second-story bedroom window and falling to the ground while an oblivious yellow butterfly pulses upward, and I’m taking the stairs two at a time. I arrive in Will’s room just in time to see a dusty brown moth, the kind that eats sweaters, escape out of the corner of the window where he’s loosened the screen just an inch.

“I saved it,” he says, smiling.

Another catastrophe averted.

I never used to worry like this. Now, I do. Now, I worry about the boys getting hurt, and about how we are going to eat, how we are going to pay our bills, how we are going to keep warm for the next five months.

Tonight it’s sure to get cold again, and sleet is in the forecast. You wouldn’t know it by looking out the window, but the deep freeze is out there, gathering strength. The second the sun goes down, it will get cold again, and it makes me tired just thinking about it. It’s difficult to do anything—play a game of cards, do laundry, make dinner—wrapped in a blanket.

But it’s the weekend and tonight I don’t want to worry.
Tonight, a Saturday, a family night with nothing planned, I’d like to do something fun with the boys. Something to take my mind off winter. Like, say, a campfire.

For a century-old house, our place has an uncharacteristically open floor plan. The kitchen, dining room, and living room are all one large rectangle with a big fireplace between the dining room and the living room. The downside of all this openness is that it makes the house difficult to heat. The upside is that there’s plenty of space in front of the fireplace for three boys to sit cross-legged and roast marshmallows.

“Let’s do an indoor campfire,” I suggest.

“That’s cool,” says Owen, managing to stand and slouch at the same time, his arms crossed over his chest in the teenaged lean.

“Then I call chopping the wood!” Luke says.

Of all of us, he is the best with tools. They fit in his slender hands easily, and with an innate proficiency he knows exactly how to use them. Not just a hammer and a handsaw, but wrenches, chisels, Vise-Grips, and pliers, too. Even the hatchet.

This last tool is out in the shop, a rustic room off the north end of our Quonset-hut garage that used to function as Mr. Wonderful’s office, workshop, and escape hatch. It has a pockmarked cement floor, but the walls and ceiling are drywalled, it’s well lit, and separated from the rest of the garage by an old sliding glass door. For heat, it has a small woodstove.

Luke has recently claimed this space as his. It used to be referred to as “Dad’s shop,” then as “the shop,” and now it’s called “Luke’s shop.” He has made swords, spears, and shields here. He has sharpened the arrows he’s made for his bow here, spent hours reading, carving, cutting, nailing, and chopping things out here, too.

Above the woodstove, my middle son has taped a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”

Luke and I head out to his shop together and he finds the hatchet hanging in its spot on the pegboard. My dad keeps his tools on a similar pegboard that hangs on the wall in his shop. My grandfathers both kept their tools on pegboards in their shops, and it brings me some satisfaction to see that Luke does this, too. I cannot teach him all the man skills he needs to know, but at least some of them are being filtered down from the men in my family. He could do no better than to grow into men like my dad and my grandfathers.

Inside this small room, I exhale and realize I have been holding my breath. I don’t come out here often. The specter of Mr. Wonderful is still here, and I can smell him. Acidic sweat, the kind that rots the armpits and necklines of T-shirts. Old Spice deodorant, spearmint Altoids. And something else I recognize but try to ignore.

“Not good,” Luke says, running his finger across the blade of the hatchet. The business end is caked with dirt and rust. It probably hasn’t been used since we all went camping together as a family at Leelanau State Park two summers ago. Somebody put it away without cleaning it first. It wouldn’t cut a dry leaf in this state, let alone logs for the fireplace.

“Maybe the whetstone is still around here somewhere,” I suggest.

So we look for it. I pull open the overhead cabinets that are too high for him to reach and he looks in the workbench. There are plenty of places it could be. Doors and drawers creak in complaint as we go through the room pulling and banging. Luke
pauses and I notice him looking way back into the dark recesses of a far drawer.

“Check this out,” he says, holding up a wooden pipe almost as long as his forearm. It has a big bowl on the end and is painted yellow, blue, and red. The painted finish is swirled, as if someone mixed three primary colors of paint together and then dipped the pipe in. Probably while sitar music played in the background.

A cloud of the smell I’ve been trying to ignore floats out of the drawer in an invisible but unwelcome mass.

“Go back outside,” I tell Luke.

The night my marriage ended I was working as a waitress and had just brought home the most I’d ever earned in tips in a single shift: $112. Night editing, writing, or reporting jobs are nonexistent in a small town like ours, and I didn’t want my sons in day care, so I got a waitress job at a local tavern. On the busiest nights, I wouldn’t get home until after midnight.

I wore a black waitress apron with two horizontal pockets tied around my hips. One pocket was for pens and my order pad and the other was for my tips. Although I usually took the apron off when I clocked out, on this night I left it on while I drove home. I wanted to feel the weight of all that money pressing down against my lap.

What would we use it for? Something fun for the boys, like a trip to the movies, maybe? A special treat from the grocery store—shrimp or salmon steaks? Or something practical, like putting it in the savings account?

I imagined the look on Mr. Wonderful’s face when I showed him my big handful of cash. How proud he’d be. It was mostly one-dollar bills—“the Michigan bankroll,” the waitresses I worked with called our end-of-the-night cash.

When I pulled into the driveway the light was still on in the shop. I looked at the clock on my dashboard: 1:35 a.m. He must have left the light on. He was always leaving lights on. He left doors ajar, cars running, shoes untied, and gates opened, too. He just spaced out, I guess, always meaning to get to everything later.

I opened the shop door and reached my hand in to turn the light off and there was my husband, sitting in this very spot, his back to the door and to me. He tossed a hasty look over his shoulder and then started grabbing at something. I didn’t remember how glazed his eyes looked until later. I guess he didn’t hear me pull in, didn’t see my headlights, didn’t hear the car door close.

“Check this out,” I said, reaching my hand into my money pocket.

He didn’t turn around, but just kept frantically grabbing at something on the workbench. His back was blocking my view, so I couldn’t see what it was, but something was off. He was acting weird. Guilty.

“Look how much I made tonight,” I said again, a little cautiously this time, walking up behind him and looking over his shoulder.

And that’s when I saw what he’d been trying so hard to hide. On his lap was a plastic bag. When I walked in, he’d been trying to brush everything into the bag before I could see what he was doing.

I’m no antidrug crusader. I’d smoked my share of joints in college and at parties, but I mostly put that behind me when we had a family. He promised he would, too.

“I can’t believe you!” I yelled, before slamming the shop door so hard it bounced right back open as I hurried into the house to check on the boys.

This is not my life
, I remember thinking.
This is not my marriage. This is not me
.

I look out the window of the shop now and see Owen, Luke, and Will breaking up sticks for our campfire. Owen and Will are smiling, but Luke is not. I make a small fire in the shop’s woodstove, toss the painted pipe in, shut the door, open the flue all the way, and listen to the burn.