The Counter That Moved Across the Highway

The café

I found out later what Walt did. He drove straight to the café on Main Street, where the same eight men had been drinking the same coffee at the same round table since the Carter administration. He walked in and did not sit down.

“Holm girl’s selling feed off Don’s dock,” he said. “Ron let her go because she’s expecting. I bought my mineral. You can do what you want.”

Then he left without having his coffee, which nobody at that table had ever seen him do.

By 8:15, Kevin Bauer pulled in. By 9:00, the Olson brothers were on the dock arguing about which one of them was going to pay for the milk replacer. By noon, half the pallet was gone, and there were three pickups lined up along the shoulder of the highway waiting to pull in.

People did not just buy. They talked. Jan Wolf brought me a thermos of coffee and a plate of bars from her church circle, peanut butter with chocolate on top, and sat on my folding chair for twenty minutes even though she had calves coming.

“You should’ve heard Marlene at circle Tuesday,” Jan said. “I’ve never heard her say a cross word in forty years. She said a few.”

Terry Wolf, who never talks, loaded his own mineral and then said one sentence to me, which was, “My mother had six of us and never missed a day of chores.” Then he got back in his truck and drove away.

At noon, Dad came out of the shed with two bologna sandwiches and handed me one. He looked at the half-empty pallet and the line of pickups and the empty lot across the highway.

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

March

I went back to Dickinson that Saturday and bought a second pallet. I bought a third the following Wednesday. Cody built me a sign out of a sheet of plywood that said Holm Feed in red letters, and then he painted a little cow under it, copying Emma’s.

I learned things fast that I had never had to learn at Ron’s. I learned how to run a ledger and how to handle the tabs I offered. I called a tax lady in Bowman to make sure I was doing it right, and she said I was and charged me forty dollars.

I took orders on my cell phone. I delivered to the ranchers who could not get away from their calving barns, in my dad’s one-ton, with Lily in her car seat beside me singing songs about ducks. I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life, and I was five months pregnant, and I was not tired.

I want to be honest about one thing. Some mornings I looked across that highway and saw Ron’s lot empty at nine o’clock, and Kassidy’s red car alone by the door, and it did not feel good. I did not feel like I had won anything. I felt like something had gotten broken, and I had been the one standing there when it broke.

I prayed about it. I asked God to forgive me if I was being proud. And I prayed for Ron, too, which was harder than I want to admit.