The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

“Gentlemen,” Tom said, “most of you know the product and not the person, so let me fix that. This is Barb Renner. She owns Prairie Line Seed Conditioning up in Logan County. Biggest independent conditioner between St. Louis and Indianapolis, and every blade of grass on this property for sixteen years has come off her lines. I wouldn’t put anybody else’s seed on my greens if you gave it to me.”

Somebody at the table said, “No kidding, that’s you?”

“That’s me,” I said.

Steve had set his phone down, face first.

“Owns,” he said.

“Since 1994,” I said. “My husband and I started it. Hello, Steve. Good to see you again.”

The man next to him looked back and forth between us. “You two know each other?”

“Her son’s dating my daughter,” Steve said slowly.

“Well, shoot, Steve, you could have told us we had an in.”

Steve did not answer that.

Tom passed the agreement down the table. I watched it go hand to hand until it stopped in front of Steve Whitlock. He turned to the last page, where the number was. Seed, overseeding blends and topdressing for three seasons, $212,000. Under it was a blank line with my name typed beneath.

He read it twice. I could tell by his eyes.

“Mom-and-pop,” he said, mostly to himself.

“It started that way,” I said, the same as I had said it over the iced tea.

That was when the door opened behind me.

“Steve, I need your card. The florist wants a deposit.”

Pam stopped in the doorway. She had on tennis whites, and she was carrying a tall glass with a napkin around the bottom.

Nobody in that room knew what they were looking at except three of us.

“Pam,” Steve said. His voice was careful. “You remember Barb. Barb owns the company that does our grounds. All of it. For sixteen years.”

I watched it travel through her. I watched her go back over the terrace, the glass, the lemon, the chair by the kitchen door. Somebody has to do it. Flag one of the girls. You’ll know how.

Her color went, and then it came back too much.

“I had no idea,” she said.

“No reason you would,” I said.

I signed the agreement. I shook five hands. Tom walked me to the door, grinning like a boy, and I told him to quit it.

Pam was waiting in the hallway. She had set her glass down on a side table. Her hands did not seem to know where to go without it.

“Barb.” She swallowed. “If I had known who you were,” she started, and then she could not find the rest.

“You’d have been lovely,” I said. “I know. I believe you would have.”

She flinched. I had not said it to hurt her. It was simply so.

“But I was the same person both days, Pam. That’s the only thing I’d ask you to think about. Not for my sake. I got along fine.”

Her eyes were wet. She looked about twenty years younger that way, and a good deal more like her daughter.

“She will hardly speak to me,” she said. “Kristen. Since that lunch.”

“She will. I’ve been after her about it.”

“You have?”

“Every Sunday.”

Pam pressed her lips together. Down the hall, somebody laughed in the bar. I thought about a farmhouse outside Pana with one bathroom, and a girl who left it and never once looked back, for fear of what might be gaining on her.