Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm Read Online Free PDF

ride
.
    They are the last ones through the gate but finally take their places in the bumper cars and the operator starts it up. The other riders grin and yelp, but my sons’ faces are flat and serious.
    Somewhere behind me I hear chuckling, then deep laughter. I assume it’s sarcastic, hurtful, and whirl around, but this laughter is sincere. Just two old men in khaki pants and straw boater hats, tourists—“fudgies,” we locals call them—leaning against the snack trailer, bent over and holding their stomachs.
    “We was gonna help,” one gasps, his mouth open in a smile wide enough for me to see the gold wiring on his partial, “but we seen you had it handled.”
    I had it handled? These men are old. They should know betterthan to believe everything they see. Because now I understand that I don’t have anything handled. Not a blessed thing.
    The four of us are just one swipe away from losing everything: the farm, the myth of divorce being survivable, the idea that I can protect my sons from everything. From anything.
    Our whole lives feel scored together as temporarily as those carnival tickets, just waiting to be torn apart.

2
August 2005
BLOOD MOON
    As many poems as I have written to the moon …
    I would like to shoot along to your ears
    for nothing, for a laugh, a song
,
    for nothing at all
,
    for one look from you
,
    for your face turned away
    and your voice in one clutch
    halfway between a tree wind moan
    and a night-bird sob
.
    —CARL SANDBURG , “Horse Fiddle”
    Now that he is beginning to settle in across the road, Mr. Wonderful wants to have the boys come and visit him for the weekend. They can choose their bedrooms, he says, and help him arrange the furniture.
    I close my eyes and press the telephone tight to my ear and know that he is talking, talking, because the whole left side of myhead is hot, but I can’t make out exactly what he is saying. His words are garbled and I see an imaginary image, like a twisted home movie, in place of his voice.
    He’s pulling into my driveway in his rusted-out work van, picking our sons up and taking them away. They sit on the floor in the back, without seat belts, because there’s no backseat in this van. No windows, either. They choke on turpentine fumes, because he is not a careful man and has spilled gallons of the stuff, more than once, soaking the fast-food wrappers he wads up and tosses over hunched shoulders. And then he drives away with our sons and doesn’t come back, not ever.
    Divorce, my father wrote on the slip of paper he folded around the check for my attorney, changes people. An odd warning from a man who has been happily married to my mother for almost half a century.
    But Mr. Wonderful is not a treacherous person and I’m not usually so prone to conspiracy theories. And yet, I can’t help it, I wonder if their father finagled his across-the-road rental as a ruse to steal our sons.
    And then the false image fades, my father’s note fades, and I am hearing my husband’s voice again, his words are perfectly clear, and he’s saying he misses our boys something awful. And I know immediately that this is fact, this is truth, and it trumps my doomsday scenario. I hear the father he is to our sons in his voice and my chest aches for him. For us.
    This empathy is good for about, oh, maybe fifteen seconds.
    Because when I hang up the phone and ask the boys if they’d like to go visit their father in his new place for the whole weekend, they say “Yes,” just like that, the little traitors.
    “Mom is like all
Neg
atron now,” Luke, a fan of the nifty Transformersquick-change toys, hisses in warning to his brothers while I boil their tomato soup and burn their grilled cheese sandwiches.
    He’s nailed it, too, because I’m pretty sure this is exactly what it would feel like to be possessed by a giant alien robot. For counsel on how to deal with this strange affliction, I turn not to my Buddhist library book but to my SMILE handbook. Mr.