The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

“I want to see it,” she said. “The plant. The table where the beans walk uphill. Can I?”

“Sunday,” I said. “Come after church. I’ll put a roast on.”

Dustin held it in until we were past the gate.

“Why didn’t you say something?” He hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, not hard. “Kristen told me. In the hallway. About the glass. Mom, she handed you her glass, and you went and got it?”

“I did.”

“And then you sat there and let her talk to you like you were, I don’t know what. Like you ought to be grateful for the chair.”

“It was a fine chair.”

“It is not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.” I watched the bean fields go by, just planted, the rows barely showing. “Dustin, what would it have got me? If I had set her straight.”

“She’d have known who you are.”

“She’d have known what I am. That isn’t the same.” I turned in the seat. “I’m a woman who got her a drink when she asked for one. That’s who I was today. I’m not ashamed of that woman.”

He drove a mile without talking.

“Kristen stayed with you,” he said finally.

“She did.”

“Her mom told her to come in, and she just sat down.”

“She did that too.”

He let out a long breath. I saw the corner of his mouth go.

“I’m going to marry that girl, Mom.”

“I know it,” I said. “I knew it when she asked about the dog.”

She came that Sunday in jeans and a pair of tennis shoes that had no business in a seed plant, so I put her in my spare rubber boots, a size too big. She clomped behind me through all three lines with her hands clasped behind her back, like a child in a museum.

The plant does not run on Sunday. I started the gravity table up just for her. I poured a five-gallon bucket of soybeans on the deck, and she watched them shiver and sort, the good ones climbing, the light ones sliding away, and she said, “Oh,” very quietly, the way you would in church.

Gary, my foreman, had come in to check a bearing. He has been with me twenty-two years. He watched her watch that table, and then he looked at me over her head and nodded once.

She did not ask what any of it cost. She did not ask how many people worked there, though she must have seen the time cards in the rack by the door. She asked whether the dust bothered my lungs, and whether I made the men wear masks.

At dinner she had seconds of the roast and scraped the carrots out of the pan. She washed and I dried. Dustin fell asleep in Ray’s chair with the dog across his feet.

“My mother called me four times this week,” Kristen said, handing me a plate. “She says I humiliated her in front of Carol Henderson.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I learned it from watching.”

I set the plate down.

“That was hard,” I said.

“It was true.”

“It can be both. Call her back tomorrow and say something soft. She’s your mother for a long time.”

Kristen scrubbed at the roasting pan.

“You keep being nice about her.”

“I keep being nice about you,” I said. “She comes with.”