The Coffee Can at the Farm Gate

“I know that.”

“Then why twenty-five a head?”

Her eyes were wet, but her voice came out hard.

“Because you’ve had the credit for thirty-one years. Carla’s hogs. Carla’s pies. Carla’s kolaches. I am Harold and Doris’s own daughter. I do every invitation and every phone call, and every August they all walk right past me to hug your neck.” She swallowed. “I thought, just once I’ll get something out of it. And then the checks started coming and it was so much. It was more than I’d figured. And the patio set was on sale.”

The old clock on the stove ticked.

It was not a good reason. But it was a real one. I had not known she felt walked past, and I ought to have. A person can be wrong and still have been hurt first.

“I didn’t use your name down there,” I said. “Not once. I said there was a mistake, and that is all I have said to anybody.”

She looked at me.

“It can stay a mistake, Tammy. Mistakes get fixed. That part’s up to you.”

I picked up two pies and carried them out, and I left her standing in my kitchen with the screen door open.

It is the custom in this family that Uncle Merle cuts the first pie.

He has done it since Harold died. Everybody gathers up around the dessert table, and Merle stands at the head of it with the pie server, and he says the same thing every year: “Well, I’m the oldest, so I’d better go first in case I don’t make it to seconds.” Everybody laughs the same as if they had never heard it.

At two o’clock they were all gathered. Merle had the server in his hand. I was at his elbow with the stack of plates, and Bob was on his other side.

“Uncle Merle.”

The whole yard turned.

Tammy was coming across the grass from the driveway with her purse on her arm. Jeff was two steps behind her. Her face was blotched, and she had her checkbook in her hand, the plain blue kind the bank gives you.

She walked right up to the table, right in front of eighty-some people, and she laid the checkbook down beside the cherry pie and bent over and wrote.

Nobody breathed. I could hear the pen.

She tore the check out. It made a little ripping sound.

She held it out to me. It was made out to Carla, for two thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. Her hand was not steady.

“That’s yours,” she said. “It was always yours. I took money to come to this farm and I had no business doing it, and Carla paid every one of you back out of her own pocket this morning. I want you to know it was her own.” Her voice cracked. “The patio set goes back to Grand Island on Monday. Jeff’s already said he’ll haul it.”

Jeff said, “Yes, ma’am, I will.”

Then Tammy turned to Merle. I think that was the hardest thing she did all day, harder than the check.

“Uncle Merle, I took your twenty dollars. And I wrote down that you owed me five more. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I did that to you.”

Merle looked at her a long moment with those wall-checking eyes.

“Well, Tammy,” he said, “then you’ve overpaid. I never did give you but the twenty. By my count Carla owes you five dollars.”

There was a breath of pure silence.