The agreement was written on a feed store notepad and taped to Delphine Moe's refrigerator, and it said in plain block letters that it would end on April 1, no hard feelings, no questions asked.
Harvey Lindahl had written it himself, the night his house burned.
HARVEY AND BRYNN STAY IN THE TWO BACK ROOMS UNTIL THE NEW HOUSE IS DONE. HARVEY DOES THE MORNING CHORES AND PAYS FOR GROCERIES. DEL WATCHES BRYNN AFTER SCHOOL. NO FUNNY IDEAS.
He had signed it. Del had signed it under him. Brynn, who was nine, had signed it too, in purple marker, with a heart over the i.
That had been in November. Now it was the week before Christmas, and half of Antler Butte, North Dakota, had ideas anyway.
"Del, I'm only saying what people are saying," said Marlys Ostrander at the post office counter, sliding a stack of Christmas cards across to her. "A widow and a widower under one roof. All winter."
"With a nine-year-old," Del said. "And two hundred head of cattle. And a wood furnace that needs feeding every four hours. It's not a honeymoon, Marlys. It's a work camp."
Marlys smiled the way post office women smile when they do not believe a word.
Del was seventy. She had run cattle on the home place south of Antler Butte since her husband, Orrin, died in 2009. Before that, for thirty-one years, she had worked as a lineman for the Antler Butte Telephone Cooperative. One of the first women to climb poles in the state, back in 1975, when the men on the crew had bet she would quit by Christmas.
She had not quit by Christmas. She had climbed poles in forty-below wind and July hailstorms and once, in April of 1997, through a three-day spring blizzard that buried the county. She had retired in 2006 with a bad shoulder and a gold watch and a key ring she had never gotten around to emptying.
Harvey Lindahl was seventy-three. He was a quiet man who raised Herefords on the next section over, and he had lost his wife, Gloria, three years ago. In March, his daughter, Kari, a sergeant in the North Dakota National Guard, had deployed overseas for a year. Harvey was raising her daughter, Brynn, until she came home.
And then, the week before Thanksgiving, his old farmhouse had burned to the foundation on a windy night. Harvey and Brynn had gotten out with their coats, the dog, and nothing else.
Del had driven over at two in the morning with blankets. She had looked at the two of them standing in the snow, watching the fire trucks, and said, "Well. I've got two empty rooms."
It worked better than the town expected, and better than Del did.
Harvey was up at five every morning to feed both herds and stoke the furnace. He made terrible coffee and excellent pancakes. He did not talk much, which suited her. He fixed the drip under the kitchen sink without being asked and the squeak in the back door that Orrin had been meaning to fix since 1991.
Brynn was another matter. Brynn talked all the time.
She talked about school and her friend Kenzie and the class guinea pig and what her mom was doing overseas, which she did not know, exactly, but had theories about. She followed Del around the barn after school in a pair of borrowed overshoes three sizes too big, asking questions.
"Why do you have so many keys?"
"Old habit," Del said.
"What are they for?"
"Mostly for doors that don't exist anymore."
Brynn considered this. "That's sad."
"It's not sad," Del said. "It's just old."
The calls from Del's daughter started in December.
Joanne was forty-four, a pharmacist in Fargo, and she loved her mother very much in the way that grown children sometimes love their parents, which is mostly by worrying at them over the phone.
"Mom, I'm not saying he's a bad man," Joanne said. "I'm saying you don't know what he wants."
"He wants a roof until April, Joanne. It's on the refrigerator."
"And what happens in April? He's a widower with no house, and you're a widow with three thousand acres."
"Then I guess he'll have to buy his own acres," Del said, "like the rest of us."
She hung up. Then she stood in the kitchen a long time, looking at the feed store note on the refrigerator. No funny ideas.
She was not sure, anymore, that she had not gotten one.
Christmas Eve came in with an ice storm.
It started as rain in the afternoon and turned to glaze by dark. By six, the power lines along the section road were sagging under an inch of ice, and the wind was picking up out of the northwest. At six-forty, the lights in the farmhouse flickered once and went out.
Harvey had the generator running in ten minutes. The furnace was wood, so the house would stay warm. They had lights in the kitchen and the water pump. They were fine.
Except for one thing.
"The video call," Brynn said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas, holding Harvey's old tablet. "Mom's call is at eight. She said they only get one call for Christmas. She said she'd be waiting."
Harvey looked at the tablet. No signal. No internet. The router on the counter sat dark and dead, even on generator power.
"It's not the house, honey," he said slowly. "It's the line. The whole town's probably out."
Brynn's face crumpled.
Del's phone rang. It was Joanne, calling on the cell, which had one bar if Del stood by the window.
"Mom, I saw the news, the whole county's dark. Are you all right? Is he there with you?"
"Of course he's here, Joanne."
"I just think, Mom, honestly, this whole arrangement is ridiculous. You're seventy years old. You shouldn't be taking care of somebody else's family in an ice storm."
Del did not answer. She was looking across the kitchen at Brynn, who was sitting on the floor against the cupboards with the dead tablet in her lap, crying without making any sound at all.
It was seven-fifteen. The call was in forty-five minutes.
And on the hook by the back door, where it had hung since 2006, Del's old key ring was swinging gently in the draft.