“Mum, that’s the neighbours’ table.”
“That’s where the seats were left.”
“Put me at four, next to Aunt Ruth. There’s a gap at four. I saw the chart.”
Ilsa straightened a corner of the chart that did not need straightening. “The list is family only, love. I had a hundred and eighteen family names to place. Everyone else is company, and company goes at nine.” She smiled at me, and it was a real smile, which was the worst part. “You’ll have a lovely time with Sandra. She’s been asking after you.”
So I set out the cards, and I set my own at table nine, since nobody else was going to do it.
On the way out to the truck I stopped at the mailbox, because there was mail in it and I am the kind of person who carries it in. Two bills, a farm supply circular, and a long white envelope from the county tax office with a window in it.
The name in the window was mine. NORAH KELLEHER, RIDGE PARCEL. The only piece of mail in that box with my name printed on it.
I had it half out of the envelope when Ilsa came around the porch corner and took it out of my hand. She did it quickly and without any fuss, the way you take a knife away from a child.
“That’s junk,” she said. “They send those out every year when they reassess.”
“It’s addressed to me.”
“It’s addressed to the parcel.” She slid it into her cardigan pocket and patted it. “Come and help me with the flowers before it gets dark.”
I stood on the gravel with my hand still open. Then I went and helped her with the flowers.
The party was everything Ilsa wanted. Two hundred people, white cloths, a band from the city playing songs older than the marriage. I sat at table nine between Sandra Pike and a man from the fire department, ate the salmon, laughed at the right times, and when Vernon stood up and thanked his wife and his children and his grandchildren and named every one of them in order, I clapped along with the neighbours, because I was company.
Ilsa came by our table once, rested her hand on my shoulder, and said to Sandra, “This one has been so good to us. Just so good.”
Sunday I slept until ten. Monday morning I called the county tax office from my kitchen and gave them my name and asked after the ridge parcel.
The clerk was young and tired of the phone and happy to read a screen out loud. Yes, she said, the ridge parcel. Payer of record, Norah Kelleher, since November 2014. Notice to owner still goes to Vernon Byrne at the farm address. Current through this year. Eleven payments.
“Eleven?” I said.
“Eleven instalments, one a year. The first was the redemption on the lien.” Keys clicked. “Do you want the history? I can mail it.”
“Mail it.”
It came on Thursday, four pages stapled, with a stamped box at the top that read CUMULATIVE PAYMENTS: $78,412.00. I went down every line with a pencil. November 2014, the lien and the penalties, the year I was engaged and used my mother’s house money to keep a piece of land that was not mine out of a tax sale. Then 2015. Then 2016. Then the rest, one a year, seventy-eight thousand four hundred and twelve dollars of mine, paid into a county ledger under a name the family had scratched off nine cards, one card at a time.
At the bottom, under the parcel description, the county had typed the payer’s mailing address. Not my house. The farm.
Every year since 2014, the county had sent a statement to that farm, addressed to me, and I had never once been allowed to keep one.
