Nineteen thousand is not enough

I found Gerhard van der Merwe's name on the co-op board today. Not the Gerhard. Not the one who owns Pieter's farm and his Caltex and his girl. A different Gerhard. A Gerhard who pays his accounts on time and keeps his registration current and does not leave notebooks on dashboards with circles drawn twice around one name. I sat in the truck with the wire form and I thought: there are two of them now. There is the Gerhard who is paying me to be here and the Gerhard who owns Pieter Viviers, and I cannot tell if I am standing in the middle of that or if I have simply stopped moving long enough to notice.

Forty-two thousand by November. My mother does not know I know about the foreclosure. She thinks she is explaining a temporary setback. She has been explaining it for seven months. Nineteen thousand I can send today and still die in this farmhouse with my hands clean and my fee half-collected. Thirty-one days I can stay and maybe survive to wire the rest and maybe find whatever is behind the wall panels and maybe become the kind of person who handles things instead of the kind who photographs them.

I asked what you would do. That was not entirely honest. I asked because I needed someone to take the weight of the choice before I made it. I already know what I will do. I will stay. I will wire the nineteen and I will stay and I will let my mother worry another month because I cannot carry her house and Pieter's notebook and the shape of whatever I am becoming all at once.