“This lease is made between Joanne Kittle, sole owner of the forty-acre tract situated on County Road 402, Marion County, Arkansas, and Miriam and Samuel Yoder…”
Alden stopped reading. The paper trembled slightly between his grease-stained fingers under the yellow glare of the kitchen ceiling bulb. He squinted at the embossed county seal at the bottom of the page, then looked up at me, his duffel bag of dirty laundry still hanging off one shoulder.
“What is this?” he asked, his voice dropping an octave. “Sole owner? Joanne, we’ve lived here forty-five years. This is my place.”
“No, Alden,” I said, leaning back against the counter with my arms folded. “Daddy left this place to me in the spring of eighty-one, three months before we stood in front of the preacher. You never wanted to put your name on the deed back then because you didn’t want the property tax bill coming out of your pocket. You just liked telling the boys down at the feed store that you owned forty acres.”
He dropped the duffel bag onto the linoleum floor with a heavy thud. “You leased the front pasture to the Yoders? Where am I supposed to run my mower?”
“Oh, I took care of that, too,” I said calmly. “Walk out on the back porch and look toward the barn.”
What Happened While He Was Out on I-40
Alden shoved open the screen door and stepped out onto the wooden planks. The security light by the pole barn hummed to life, illuminating the empty concrete pad where his $12,800 zero-turn mower usually sat under a fitted canvas tarp.
“Where’s my Ferris?” he barked, spinning back toward the kitchen. “Did somebody steal it?”
“Not stolen,” I replied, pulling a folded receipt from my apron pocket and laying it next to the lease on the kitchen table. “You closed our joint checking account on Tuesday and rerouted my postal pension into an account I couldn’t touch. Well, it turns out the finance company out of Mountain Home still had three payments left on that mower—and the co-signer on the note was me. Since I didn’t have access to our joint funds anymore, I called them up and told them to come repossess it before it went into default. They gave me back my down payment in cash.”
Alden stared at me as if a stranger had walked into his house wearing my floral housedress. For thirty years, he had been gone two weeks at a time on the road, coming home for three days to clean sheets, hot chicken and dumplings, ironed lodge shirts, and a wife who never asked where the rest of his trucking money went.
“You’re out of your mind,” he muttered, rubbing a hand down his face. “I’m calling my sisters. Wait till Carol and Denise hear you’re throwing forty-five years of marriage down the drain over a bank account.”
“Go ahead and call them,” I said, nodding toward the wall phone. “Tell them while you’re at it that starting Monday, Miriam Yoder’s hundred and twenty dairy goats are moving onto the front pasture at four hundred dollars a month, plus half the hay yield. And tell them I already had the plumber out from Harrison to put in a brand-new fifty-gallon water heater. Paid in full.”
The Sound Across the Road
Before Alden could reach for the phone, a soft bleating sound drifted through the open kitchen window, followed by the rhythmic clank of a metal latch.
Alden walked to the window and looked out across the gravel road. Under the pale Arkansas moon, Sam Yoder and his two oldest boys were leading the first dozen Nubian goats through the wide-open pasture gate, the animals immediately dropping their heads to graze on the thick fescue Alden used to spend every Saturday afternoon manicuring like a golf course.
On the porch across the road, Miriam Yoder raised her glass of sweet tea toward our kitchen window and chuckled softly.
Alden turned back to me, the arrogant grin from two weeks ago completely gone. The paper paycheck he had waved in my face was still tucked inside his shirt pocket, suddenly looking very small in a house where he didn’t own a single nail in the floorboards.
“Joanne,” he said, his voice tight and uncertain for the first time since 1981. “Where am I supposed to sleep tonight?”
I walked over to the hallway closet, pulled out a clean pillow and a folded wool blanket, and set them neatly on top of his duffel bag.
“The guest room down the hall has fresh sheets,” I told him, picking up my keys from the hook by the door. “And if you’re hungry, there’s a diner still open up on Highway 62. Whoever brings home the paycheck calls the shots, Alden—and right now, you’re just a guest on my forty acres.”
Editorial Note: This story was written with AI assistance. All names, places, and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
