“I just want to go to McDonald’s,” Toby said.
Deep breath. Eyes on the road.
“So... it’s possible... if your dad can’t pay the money... that we’d need to put the farm up for sale.”
There was no good place to deliver this news. She’d chosen the car because there was no way for the three of them, taking in the words from inside the station wagon, in the middle of the New York State Thruway, to walk away from her.
“You can’t sell the farm,” Al said. “That’s not okay. It’s horrible. We won’t let you.”
“You didn’t even ask what we think.” This was Ursula.
“I hate the idea of selling the farm as much as you do, honey,” Eleanor said. “But I might not have a choice.”
“Oh,right,” Al said. Her voice dripped with contempt.
“School costs a lot of money. Everything does. Right now I don’t even own the home I’m living in and I want to have a place of my own someday. But the main thing is you guys. Your education. Your security.”
“We don’t care about school,” Ursula said. “We don’t care about any of that other stuff.”
“You can’t make us leave the farm. And Dad and Coco and Elijah and Buster.” Al again.
The tree fort. The animals. The woodshop. Their moss bed, and the lady’s slippers. Old Ashworthy. The pond.
It was probably just as well Eleanor had to keep her eyes on the highway. If she had been able to look at her daughters’ faces, she knew what she would see.
“You make me sick,” Al told her.
“Honey...” she said. Honey what? What could she say that would make her children feel any differently? Nothing.
“I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it. You’re crazy. You’re mean.” This was Ursula.
It was Al who delivered the final blow, the one that flattened her. She spoke from the back seat, her voice hard and low—no yelling, just a deadly whisper.
“If you make our dad leave our house we’ll never forgive you,” she told Eleanor. “We’ll hate you for the rest of our lives.”
Al put the headphones back on. Her Walkman might be dead, but she would shut her mother out anyway.
There was nothing to say after that. With the exception of once, a half hour later, when Eleanor asked Ursula to take some quarters out of her purse to pay for the toll, and another time, when Toby asked Al to read what the Magic 8 Ball told them in answer to the question “Is God real?” (“Reply hazy, try again”), they rode the rest of the way to computer camp in silence.
The appraisal on the farm came in at just over three hundred thousand dollars, meaning that to buy her out, Cam needed to pay Eleanor half that figure. There was no way he’d manage even a tenth of this—no way he could pay her anything. There had been a time when his father might have helped him out with money, but Eleanor had gathered, from the children, that their grandfather had suffered a stroke and required round-the-clock care now. All of the family money was spoken for.
Computer camp lasted a month. If Eleanor had supposed her daughter might have softened her position by the time she came home, she was mistaken.
Four weeks after dropping Al off at camp, Eleanor drove west again to pick her up—this time, without the other children. Getting in the car, with her Walkman and her duffel bag, Al said nothing until they were out on the highway. Then, surprisingly, she took off her headphones.
“Are you still going to try and make our dad sell our farm? Because if so, I’ll find my own way home.”
The next day, Eleanor called her attorney. “I want to sign off on my rights to the farm,” she said.
Silence on the other end of the line. She paid two hundred dollars an hour for moments like these.
“Do you know what you’re saying, Eleanor?” he asked her. “You’re walking away from a six-figure asset. You understand that, right?”
That wasn’t the half of it. She drove over to his office that afternoon to sign the paperwork.
Her old home was gone that swiftly. A visit to the lawyer’s office. A signature on a piece of paper. She was out the door in ten minutes.
The farm at the end of the long dead-end road wasn’t hers anymore.
