Four days after we buried my husband, my father-in-law sold the nineteen cords of firewood Derrick split to heat our house this winter, kept the $850, and told me at my own table, “You won’t be up here come January anyway, Hope.” I didn’t raise my voice. I asked him one question, and he answered it like it was nothing.
That wood stove is the only heat in the house, and my daughter is twelve.
I found out on Thursday morning.
Katarina said her room was cold, so I went out to the shed for an armload before school.
The shed was empty.
Not low. Empty.
Trailer tracks ran through the frost all the way down to the road, and somebody had left a gas station coffee cup on the chopping block.
Derrick spent every Saturday from June to Labor Day on that wood.
He and Enrique Pappas rented a splitter and ran it behind the barn until the light went, and Derrick came in with sawdust down his collar and made me walk out and count the rows with him.
Like it was money in the bank.
It was.
He died on a Tuesday in October, in his truck, in the parking lot of the feed store. Forty-one years old.
We buried him on a Saturday.
Greg came by that Thursday afternoon and let himself in the back door without knocking.
He sat at the head of the table, in Derrick’s chair, and set his keys down next to the napkin holder.
“Took care of that wood for you,” he said.
“Took care of it how?”
“Sold it. No sense letting it sit out there.”
“For how much?”
“Eight-fifty. Fifty a cord, and they hauled it themselves.”
I stood at the sink and did the math with my hands in the water.
The man out on the county road gets two seventy-five a cord, delivered.
Nineteen cords.
Over five thousand dollars, gone for the price of a used recliner.
“So where’s the eight-fifty, Greg?”
He waved at the air. “Gas. The trailer. My time. It’s handled.”
Then he leaned back in Derrick’s chair.
“You won’t be up here come January anyway. A woman alone on forty acres with a kid? He only got this place because I gave him the price. When you sell, you call me first. We leave the realtor out of it.”
Katarina was on the stairs. I could see her socks through the rail.
I wanted to throw his keys in the stove.
There was nothing in it to burn.
So I kept my hands in the dishwater and said, “Thanks for dealing with it.”
His shoulders came down an inch. “Somebody had to.”
I dried off and pulled out the chair across from him.
“Who’d you sell it to? I want to thank them for the hauling.”
He didn’t even blink.
“Enrique took seven cords. Beatrice Lange took four for her and her sister. The Hamiltons out on Pine Road took the rest.”
I knew every name.
Every one of them stood in my yard after the service.
Enrique carried the casket.
Beatrice brought a ham and stayed to do my dishes.
“What’d you tell them?” I said.
He looked at the window.
“That you were getting out. Selling up.”
“You told Enrique I was SELLING THE HOUSE?”
“It’s what you’re gonna do, Hope. Everybody knows it but you.”
“I want it back by Sunday. All of it. You call them.”
He laughed once through his nose.
“I’m not driving all over the county begging for wood I already sold.”
“It wasn’t yours to sell.”
“That was my land before it was ever his.” He stood up so fast the chair went over. “Don’t you make me the bad guy. I was helping you.”
The back door banged and his truck went down the hill.
Katarina came the rest of the way down.
“Call the sheriff, Mom. He STOLE it. He stole Dad’s wood.”
She was right.
But a deputy wasn’t going to put heat in her room before the first hard freeze, and a court date in March wasn’t going to either.
And Greg was the only grandpa she had left.
“Let me handle it,” I said.
She went upstairs and shut her door. Not hard. That was worse.
That night I did what I’d done every night since Tuesday. I lay on the couch and scrolled back through his texts.
The last real one was from Labor Day weekend.
A picture of the shed, stacked to the rafters, every split end turned out flat like he was expecting an inspection.
Under it he’d written, “19 cords. You and Kat are warm till April. Maybe May lol.”
I hadn’t cried at the funeral.
I cried then, on the living room rug, with the phone on my chest, over a picture of wood.
Around two I got up and made coffee.
His ranch dressing was still in the fridge door. Nobody else in the house eats it.
At seven-thirty I was standing on Enrique Pappas’s back step with the rest of Beatrice’s ham in foil, because you don’t show up at a neighbor’s with nothing.
He opened the door in his socks.
“Hope. Get in here out of the cold.”
His kitchen smelled like woodsmoke.
The stack beside his stove had every end turned out flat.
We sat. He asked about Katarina. I told him she’d quit eating breakfast.
“Enrique, it’s about the wood.”
“Greg said you wanted it gone. Said you couldn’t stand to look at it.”
“I never said that. I never said ANY OF IT.”
He set his mug down very slowly.
I turned my phone around and slid it across to him. The picture of the shed. The text under it.
He read it. Then he read it again, and his thumb kept moving up the screen like there might be more of Derrick above it.
“He sent me that same picture,” he said. “Same day.”
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then Enrique stood, walked to the hook by his door and took down his coat.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer.
He picked his own phone up off the counter, opened something, and held it out to me.
It was a text from Greg.
Sent at 9:12 on the morning of the funeral, two hours before we put his son in the ground.
9:12
“Got 19 cords at Derricks. 50 a cord you haul. Hope wants it gone, dont bring it up with her today she’s not right.”
That was all of it. No hello. No period at the end.
Under it, Enrique’s answer, at 9:15.
“Ill take 7. Sorry about all this Greg.”
He’d typed that in his good shirt, probably, getting ready to carry Derrick out of the church.
“I said yes,” Enrique said. He still had his coat half on. “I stood in that line and shook his hand and I’d already said yes.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I knew what Derrick was out there doing all summer. I was out there with him.”
I took a picture of his screen with my phone. My hands were cold enough that the first one came out blurry, so I took another.
Enrique zipped his coat.
“I’m getting the trailer. It’ll be back in your shed by noon.”
“I’ll pay you back the three-fifty.”
“You will not.”
He went to the counter for his keys, then stopped with them in his hand and scrolled up one more time, past the 9:12.
“There’s one more from him. From Monday. Before the funeral home even had him.”
He turned the phone so I could read it.
“Hamilton kid still looking for a place up our way?”
“What’d you tell him?” I said.
“I gave him Jayden’s number.”
The folding chairs
The Friday before the funeral, Greg had been the most useful man in Langlade County.
He called the funeral home for me. He called the church. He said he’d bring up two dozen folding chairs from the basement at Saint John’s for after the service, because our house only seats six, and he’d set them up himself so I didn’t have to think about it.
“You and Kat go pick out the box,” he said. “I’ll handle the house.”
He still had a key. He’d always had a key.
Derrick bought the forty acres from him in 2014. The house, the barn, the shed, the pasture down to Pine Road, eighty thousand dollars when it was worth twice that. Greg reminded everybody about the price at every Christmas for ten years.
I’d had the fire box out that week because the funeral home wanted a copy of something, and the deed was right on top. Derrick’s name, then mine. Joint, with survivorship.
I remember the closing. The woman at the title office asked how we wanted it titled, and Greg laughed and said, “Why’s she going on it?”
Derrick said, “Because she’s my wife, Dad.”
It’s the only time I ever heard him say no to his father in a room with other people in it.
Kat and I got home from the funeral home Friday around four-thirty. The chairs were folded against the living room wall in a stack. Greg’s truck was already gone.
The upstairs hall light was on. Katarina’s door was open, and she always keeps it shut.
There were wet boot prints on her rug, two different sizes, and a yellow tape measure on her windowsill.
I figured Greg had measured something for the chairs. I don’t know what. I didn’t think about it hard. I put the tape measure in the junk drawer with the twist ties and the dead batteries and went to find Derrick’s good shoes for the funeral home.
The sympathy cards started coming that same day. I stuck them on the fridge under magnets as they came, most of them still sealed.
Now, at a quarter to noon on Friday, Enrique backed his trailer up to my shed and the two of us started unloading.
He stacked them the way Derrick did. Ends out.
He didn’t talk the whole time. When the last split was in, he stood in the shed door and looked at the empty half.
“Twelve more cords out there someplace,” he said.
Beatrice Lange’s porch
Beatrice lives in town with her sister, in the yellow house with the plastic geese by the steps.
I brought nothing this time. I’d given her own ham away already.
She knew why I was there before I said it. She held the storm door open with her hip and didn’t ask me in.
“Hope, honey. I’ve been praying for you.”
“Greg sold you wood that wasn’t his.”
“Greg lost a son.”
“So did I. I lost a husband.”
She looked behind her, into the house, where I could hear the stove ticking.
“He told me you’d already had a realtor out,” she said. “Before Derrick was even in the ground. He said you were measuring for a buyer.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, he was pretty upset about it.”
I asked for the four cords back. I said I’d give her the two hundred she paid.
“We’ve burned near one already, with this cold. My sister’s got the arthritis.” She pulled her cardigan tight. “I’ll give you the three that’s left if you want it that bad. But I’m not going to make that man look like a liar in front of the whole church, Hope. He’s got enough on him.”
“He is a liar.”
“He’s Derrick’s father.”
She shut the storm door, and then the wood door behind it.
I sat in my car in front of the plastic geese and called Greg. He didn’t answer. I called again.
Ten minutes later my phone buzzed.
It wasn’t Greg. It was Katarina, from the school office phone.
“Grandpa came to get me out of sixth hour,” she said. “He says you’re running all over town embarrassing the family. Mom, is that true?”
Pine Road
I picked her up myself. Greg was gone before I got there. The secretary said he’d been very polite.
Katarina didn’t say anything in the car. On Pine Road I slowed down at the Hamiltons’ mailbox, and she looked at me.
“You want to stay in the car?”
“No.”
The Hamiltons are a young couple, Jayden and Rachelle, who’ve been renting the little house at the end of Pine Road since spring. They have a baby. They’ve been looking to buy since I’ve known them.
Eight cords were stacked along the side of their rental under a blue tarp. Ends turned out.
Rachelle came out with the baby on her hip before we’d even shut the car doors.
“Oh, Hope. I’m so sorry. We were at the service. We sat in the back.”
“I know. Thank you for coming.”
“Did Greg send you? About the walk-through?”
I didn’t answer that. I didn’t know how to.
Jayden came around from the back of the house wiping his hands on his jeans. He looked at the tarp, then at me, then at Katarina standing beside me in her school coat.
“Greg said you knew about the wood,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
“He said it’d be ours anyway come January. That’s why he gave it to us cheap. It’s for the house.”
“What house?”
Rachelle shifted the baby to her other hip.
“Your house,” she said. “Greg’s selling it to us. He said he’s buying it back off you after Christmas and we close with him the second week of January. We’re pre-approved at two-eighty.”
Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
Greg’s family price to me was going to be whatever I’d take with a cold house and a twelve-year-old.
Katarina had both hands in her coat pockets.
“Is that why he said not to call a realtor?” she said.
The junk drawer
The Hamiltons pulled into my yard at six with the eight cords on Jayden’s dad’s trailer.
I hadn’t asked them to. Rachelle had called after we left and said, “We can’t keep it now. We just can’t.”
Jayden stacked it with Enrique’s, ends out, with the yard light on. He wouldn’t take the four hundred I tried to hand him. I put it in the baby’s diaper bag while Rachelle wasn’t looking.
When he was done Rachelle came in to use the bathroom, and on her way back she stopped in my kitchen with the baby asleep on her shoulder.
She looked up at the ceiling.
“Is it the room right over this one? With the slanted wall?” she said. “Jayden wanted to knock it through for the nursery.”
Katarina was at the table doing math. She put her pencil down.
“That’s my room,” she said.
Rachelle’s face went red all the way down her neck.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t mean… Greg said…”
She stopped. Then she said, to me, quieter, “Did a tape measure ever turn up? It’s Jayden’s dad’s. I think we left it upstairs.”
I went to the junk drawer.
It was under the twist ties. Yellow. Somebody had written HAMILTON on the side of it in black marker.
I held it out to her.
“When were you in my house?” I said.
“Friday. Around two.” She took it without looking at it. “He said you’d be at the funeral home till four. He said you’d want it quiet, that you didn’t want to deal with showings while you were grieving. He brought those chairs in first so it’d look like somebody was using the place.”
Katarina got up from the table.
She went to the stairs, and stopped on the second one, and turned around.
“Grandpa took people in my room while we were picking out Dad’s casket?”
Sunday, five o’clock
I told Greg Sunday, so it was Sunday.
On Saturday I took the sympathy cards down off the fridge and opened every one of them at the kitchen table. Forty-one cards. The Lutheran ladies had pooled three hundred dollars into one.
It came to $1,310.
I drove it out to the man on the county road and bought four cords at two seventy-five, delivered, to fill the hole Beatrice left. I stacked them myself. I did not turn the ends out the way Derrick did, because I didn’t know how to yet.
Saturday night I put a new lock on the back door. It took me an hour and a YouTube video.
At five on Sunday Greg’s truck came up the hill. He went to the shed first. He stood in the door of it a long time.
Then he came to the back door and turned his key in it, and it didn’t go.
He knocked.
I let him in. He didn’t sit down. He looked at Derrick’s chair and stayed standing.
“So you went around to my friends,” he said. “Every one of them. Told them I’m a thief. You took food off Beatrice’s table, you know that? Her sister’s eighty years old. You had Enrique Pappas looking at me in church this morning like I was something on his boot. And the Hamilton kids. Two kids with a baby and a pre-approval, and you’ve got them crying on the phone to me at nine o’clock at night.”
I set the tape measure on the table next to the napkin holder.
He looked at it.
“Oh, for God’s sake. I showed them a house. People show houses.”
“It’s my house.”
“It’s my son’s house. It’s my land. My father cleared that pasture with a team of horses. You think I’m going to sit in town and watch some realtor from Wausau sell it to people from Illinois?” He put both hands on the back of Derrick’s chair. “I’d have given you sixty for it. Sixty thousand cash, Hope. In January, with no heat, you’d have taken it, and you’d have thanked me. That’s more than fair for a woman with no job and a kid and no man up here.”
“You were going to sell it to the Hamiltons for two-eighty.”
“So I make a little. Who’s got more right to make a little on that land than me?”
Katarina was on the stairs. I could see her socks through the rail.
She came down.
She went past me, to the table, and picked up his key ring from where he’d dropped it, and held it out to him.
“Kat, honey,” he said. “Your mother’s upset. Tell her I was just trying to look after you two.”
“You let them measure my window,” she said.
He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it for a second. Then he said, “It was going to be somebody else’s window anyway.”
Katarina put the keys in his hand.
I said, “Take the key off. The old one. I want it.”
He worked it off the ring with his thumbnail, slow, and set it on the table beside the tape measure.
His truck went down the hill.
Katarina stood at the window until she couldn’t see the lights.
The first hard freeze
It came the second week of December. Nine below, the radio said.
Katarina’s room was warm. I could tell because she’d kicked her comforter onto the floor.
I went out to the shed before school for an armload. The frost on the yard was clean all the way to the road.
The sympathy cards are in a shoebox on top of the fridge now, empty. Greg sent one more card at Thanksgiving, addressed to Katarina. It’s in there too. She hasn’t asked for it.
Enrique comes up some Saturdays. Last time he showed me how to turn the ends out so they shed the snow.
When I came back in, Katarina was sitting in Derrick’s chair at the head of the table, eating cereal.
She looked up at me with the spoon in her mouth.
“Mom. It’s way too hot up there.”
“Then crack your window,” I said, and I put another split in the stove.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s out stacking wood for the people they love this winter.
When family crosses the line over what’s yours, the betrayal can take many forms – read about the envelope with his mother’s name inside, the wallet he claimed he forgot, and the steak he paid for with her mother’s card.
