The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

It turned out that was the trouble. Half the women working that terrace wore dark slacks and a light top too.

Now the other thing. The thing my son did not know.

Ray and I started cleaning seed in 1994 in a machine shed outside Mount Pulaski, with one used air screen cleaner we bought at an auction in Decatur for $2,200. We cleaned wheat and oats for our neighbors, by the bushel, and I kept the books at the kitchen table after Dustin went to bed. The first year we cleared less than I had made as a bank teller.

Ray died in 2016. A Tuesday in October, in the cab of the truck, in our own lane. He was fifty-three.

By then we had two lines running. Everybody at the funeral lunch assumed I would sell. Two men asked me about it before the ham was gone.

I did not sell. I do not have a noble reason for that. I just could not think what else I would do with my mornings.

In the nine years since, I added a third line, a color sorter, a gravity table the size of a pool table, a bagging line, and a warehouse you could park a church in. We condition soybeans, wheat, oats, cover crop mixes, and turf seed for dealers in four states. I have thirty-one people on payroll. Last year the plant took in a little over nine million dollars, and I do not owe a bank a nickel of it.

Dustin knew his mother ran the seed plant. He knew I worked too much and drove a 2011 pickup with a cracked dash and still lived in the farmhouse with the kitchen floor that slopes toward the stove. He thought, I believe, that we got by. That the place paid its people and kept the lights on and left me about what a schoolteacher makes.

I let him think it. Ray and I decided that together, back when the first good year came, and after Ray was gone I kept the promise for both of us.

We had watched what money did to the boys who grew up knowing about it. We knew three families, and I will not name them, where the sons were waiting. That is the only word for it. Waiting on a farm, waiting on a father. Thirty-five years old and waiting.

Ray said, “I want him to want something before he finds out he doesn’t have to.”

So Dustin climbed poles for a living, in ice storms, and paid his own truck note. And he loved a girl whose parents had a gate.

I am not telling you this so you will think I was hiding in the bushes with a bank statement. I was not testing anyone that day. I went to lunch in my cardigan because that is my cardigan.

But I will be honest. Once that glass was in my hand, I did get curious.

There were two ways to handle it, and I saw them both plainly.

I could say, “I believe there’s been a mistake. I’m Barb Renner, Dustin’s mother.” I could say it nicely. Pam Whitlock would turn red, and her friends would look at their shoes, and everybody would laugh too loudly, and for the rest of our lives that woman would remember me as the person who embarrassed her in front of the visor.

Or I could get the woman her drink.