The Counter That Moved Across the Highway

Dickinson

Cody got off at five. We left the kids with my sister Jenna, who has two of her own and lives four blocks from us, and we drove to Dickinson in Dad’s one-ton with the flatbed. It was fifty-two miles and the wind was hitting us broadside the whole way.

Jeff Lund met us at the warehouse at seven. He had a sales manager with him, a tired man named Greg who looked at me like I might be some kind of trouble.

“You’re buying for resale?” Greg asked.

“I am.”

“You understand you’re paying up front, no terms.”

“I understand.”

I had written the order on the back of a church bulletin. Thirty sacks of the high-magnesium mineral, fifty pounds each. Sixteen sacks of milk replacer, the all-milk kind the Olsons liked. Ten bags of colostrum replacer, because that was what people ran out of first at three in the morning.

Greg rang it up. It came to three thousand three hundred and eighty-seven dollars. I handed him our debit card, and the machine took a long time to think about it, and Cody stood next to me with his hand on my back.

It went through. Cody let out a breath like he had been holding it since Wednesday.

Jeff ran the forklift himself and set the pallet on the flatbed and helped Cody strap it down. When we were done, he shook my hand and then held onto it.

“You were the reason I liked that stop,” he said. “Ron’s a good man. But you were the reason.”

I did not cry until we were halfway home. Cody did not say anything. He just turned the radio down and drove.