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A few weeks later I gave Shea my notice at Cru. We sublet our Brooklyn apartment and moved back home to our house for a three-month summer, which we hadn’t done since our wedding in 2002. We immediately planted the garden. I carefully unpacked my Japanese knives in my incongruously rustic kitchen—the propane stove, the water jugs above the sink, the buckets below. The new electric line powered a few more lights, but we didn’t have the money to go all the way and plumb the house for running water. Not having a job, and not seeing a way to get one, I concentrated on our daily three squares. I picked vegetables from the garden, brought them up the hill, cooked them, and then we ate them. The amount of cooking that would have taken me just an hour or two back in a restaurant kitchen now filled an entire day. Within weeks of arriving from New York, my internal clock had slowed to a calming tick.
Just like before, we drove around a lot, Aaron taking photos of abandoned buildings to hang up on his studio walls. We still received our mail at the Osage post office, about eight miles to the southwest, and every few days we drove there to retrieve it, sometimes going the long way to stop at the cemetery where Aaron’s brother, Matt, was buried. We never went anywhere without throwing our garbage into the back of the truck to dispose of at the Osage dump.
Maynard, the suspendered dump attendant, sat in a building not much larger than a phone booth, just big enough to hold a chair and a small wooden desk with a pad of paper on it. He heaved his round belly out of the doorway to get a better look at the contents of our truck bed before assigning some odd value to its disposal. A bag of garbage and an old broken nightstand might cost us “A dollar sixty-three.” Four bags and two grocery bags of recycling: “Three eighty-eight.” It was random like that, as if he were using some sort of complicated penny-calculation system to keep his mind sharp. More likely it was to allay his boredom, although his delivery was perfectly deadpan. The ease with which he kept up his ongoing joke seemed to me like country-living candy, our weekly treat.
After grabbing our mail, we hit the Osage grocery, attached to the post office. The store wasn’t much—good for basics like sugar and butter and second-rate VHS videos—but it had a decent selection of meat. With or without a stop there, getting the mail always had a way of eating up an afternoon.
I held a piece of scrap paper on which I’d sketched a plan for the next two days’ cooking, but nothing was set in stone. I loitered at the meat counter just as my mother had done before me, considering the heavy question of dinner. Steak on the grill? Rubbed with anchovy and rosemary? Or should I make teriyaki chicken legs, glazed with mirin and soy? A woman in a long plaid shirt next to me was doing the same thing, holding a pack of thin pork steaks in a loose grip but still peering into the shiny, plastic-wrapped abyss. Pork butt was on sale, ninety-eight cents a pound. We glanced at each other’s hands and silently agreed: It didn’t get much cheaper than that. Standing there, marinating in the salty brine of my childhood, I remembered how it felt to be a side-child, an accomplice to my mother’s indecision. Now I was the unsure lady of my own house. The plaid stranger and I stood there like players in a reconstructed grocery-store drama, making me think that the whole town was doing this, and had always been doing this, calculating pounds and pennies.
On the way home, as the bag of groceries with the pork butt in it rolled around the back of the truck, we saw something in the distance in the middle of the road. It was an animal. No, a kid. Finally we drove close enough to make out an elderly lady crouched on the asphalt, digging in a hole in the middle of the dotted line.
Before we had even fully pulled our truck onto the shoulder she stood up and shouted, gesticulating toward Aaron, “Young man! Young man, you can help me pull this up!”
When we got out, we could see that the hole’s bottom was deep and black. She puffed out the words: “We’ve got…to get…this thing up! Just…you try it.” She sat back with a huff and handed him a pair of pliers.
“That’s my house over there,” she said, pointing to a white one-story across the road. Two of the biggest apple trees I’d ever seen stood like bulldogs in the front yard.
“I’ve lived there all my life. I know my borders. And now that guy”—she pointed her elbow toward a beige new construction—“is circulating a different story.”
Her feistiness clued me in to who she was. This lady, wearing a trim pair of pedal pushers and a doughnut-size bun, had to be the one who wrote long letters of great opinion to the Park Rapids newspaper, signing them “Margaret Sexton—Osage.”
Eventually we understood the problem: Margaret was trying to pull up a buried property stake and move it a few feet up the road. Turned out that every few hundred feet there was a buried metal property stake dividing the imposition of the road’s footage fairly between owners. Like invisible buttons connecting one piece of property to the other. The stake seemed pretty permanent to me, but Aaron was now embroiled in her mission, his body curving back over his heels, all of his weight pulling on the pliers. He caved forward.
“This stake isn’t going anywhere.” He looked behind him to see if any cars were coming, but I’d been keeping watch. There’d been no movement in either direction for the past five minutes.
“No!” Margaret howled. “The stake has to come up and then it needs to go back down right here!” She scooted eight feet up the road and slapped her blue Keds sneaker on the hot tar.
A semitruck approached and we slid to opposite sides of the road. When it left, we crossed and I held out my hand to shake good-bye.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” I said.
The high rounds of her cheeks drooped suddenly and the lines in her face deepened into pleats. She looked into my eyes and said, “Now you need to come to my house for some pie.”
I had a strong feeling that she made very good pie, probably from strong-smelling apples she gathered up from the ground, pared by hand into small, worried c’s, and then cut crosswise into sunlight-yellow triangles. Old-school ladies like her made pie from what they could find around them; they didn’t buy fruit for it. Not just because store-bought fruit was contrary to their thrift, but because they knew that commercial fruit had long since been bred to be sweet and complicit. Compared to the homegrown, store fruit had lost much of its essential fire, its acidity, and its attitude—all of which Margaret had in spades.