The Scale He Had to Pull Onto

Monday he told me Larry had fed them pizza from the gas station for dinner and again for supper.

“Your pans are still froze solid,” Dale said through the window. “Nobody’s going to climb down off a combine at five o’clock to go light an oven, Deb. You know that. It’s good pizza. I’ve got nothing against it.”

I did know that. For twenty-six years the one who lit the oven had been me.

Tuesday it was pizza again.

Wednesday he did not say anything about food. He just handed a foil pan in through my window when he came across empty. It was half a pan of his wife’s meatloaf.

“She said you’d be on your feet all day too,” he said. “She said nobody ever carries a supper to the one that carries the suppers.”

I had to turn around and look at the moisture tester for a minute.

Wednesday was also the day Wes came out to the scale house with his toothpick and his careful face.

“Deb, I hate to be the one,” he said. “Energy’s got your farm tank on hold. The bill’s forty days out. Driver can’t drop diesel till it’s paid, that’s the rule for everybody, and Larry’s about to run a combine dry.”

The fuel bill had been in the red folder. First page.

I could have written the check right there. The checkbook was in my purse, where it had lived for twenty-six years.

I want to be honest that I thought about not doing a thing. I thought about letting him run dry in the middle of a field and find out.

I did not. A combine sitting dead in October costs real money, and half of that money was mine. But I did not pay it for him either. I called his phone, and when he did not pick up I called Jeff’s.

“Tell Larry the fuel bill is the first thing in the red folder,” I said. “Tell him to stop at the co-op office with a check before noon or they can’t deliver. It’s two thousand six hundred and some.”

Larry came in at eleven-thirty with chaff in his hair. I saw the pickup go by my window to the office. I saw it go back out. He raised two fingers off the steering wheel at me, the way he would to any neighbor.

That night he was at the kitchen table when I got home, with the red folder open in front of him and his reading glasses on. It was nine o’clock. He had come in early from the field to do it, and I knew what that cost him in bushels.

“Which account does the seed prepay come out of?” he said.

“The operating account. The one with the blue checks.”

“And the land payment?”

“That’s automatic, first of December. I set that up six years ago.”

He nodded. He wrote it down on the back of an envelope.

“I didn’t know we had three accounts,” he said.

“I know you didn’t.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He looked worn right through.

“There’s meatloaf in the icebox,” I said. “Dale’s wife sent it.”

“I had pizza,” he said, and for a second we almost laughed.

Thursday morning was the north eighty.

Dale mentioned it at ten o’clock, the way he mentioned everything. He came across full and said, “That’s the last off the home place. He’s moving the combine up to the north eighty after dinner.”