The Farm They Nearly Signed Away

Prairie Rose

Prairie Rose Care Center sat between a soybean field and a Casey’s General Store on Route 9, a low brick building with fake shutters and a flag out front that had faded to the color of weak tea. Inside it smelled like every one of these places smells, floral spray laid over something the spray is trying to cover. A young woman at the front desk asked who I was there to see, and when I said Earl Merrick her whole face changed, softened, the way a face changes when you mention someone the staff has quietly decided to love.

“Oh, Earl,” she said. “He’s a sweetheart. He’s in the sunroom. Are you family?”

I thought about it for exactly one second. “I’m his daughter-in-law,” I said, which was eleven years out of date and truer than anything Dale had said about that man in a decade.

She walked me back. And there, in a vinyl chair by a window that looked out on the parking lot instead of the fields he had farmed for half a century, sat Earl Merrick.

He was smaller. That is the thing that takes the wind out of you, how they get smaller. His flannel shirt hung off his shoulders and his hands, those enormous hands that could gentle a spooked heifer, lay in his lap like he did not know what to do with them anymore. But when he turned and saw me, something came up behind his eyes like a porch light switching on in a dark yard.

“Diane,” he said. Not confused. Not a beat of confusion. “Diane, honey. They told me you moved to Arizona.”

I sat down in the chair beside him and took one of those big hands in both of mine. “I never moved anywhere, Earl. I’ve been forty minutes up the road the whole time.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him do the arithmetic, watched him understand that he had been told a story, and watched the understanding land somewhere that hurt.

“They said a lot of things,” he said quietly. “I’m starting to think most of them weren’t so.”