The Row With His Name On It
March
Erik died on a Tuesday in March. He was forty-four years old. He was in the machine shed at the farm, changing the oil in the old Ford tractor, and his heart stopped.
A neighbor driving by saw the shed door open and his truck still there at dark. I will not write more about that day than that. It belongs to us.
What I will say is that the spring after was the first April in thirteen years that nobody planted anything on our land. I could not do it. I could barely put gas in my own car.
I went back to work in May. The lab does not stop. People still need their blood drawn and their cultures read, and I found that the machines and the labels and the routine held me up on the days I could not hold myself.
Kurt came around a lot that first month. He mowed my yard in town. He fixed the garage door opener that Erik had been meaning to fix for a year.
Then he came around less. I did not think much of it. Everybody was hurting, and Kurt and Erik had been close in the way brothers are close, which is mostly by not saying anything at all.
October
In October Kurt called me. It was the first time in a while.
“You opening the farm this year?” he asked.
I was standing in the kitchen with a dish towel in my hand. I had not let myself think about it. The trees did not care that Erik was gone. They had kept growing all summer, unsheared and shaggy, with the grass up past their lower branches.
“I don’t know, Kurt,” I said. “I don’t know if I can stand out there.”
“I could help,” he said. “I could get it open for you. Mow the paths, get the shaker running.”
I told him I would think on it. I meant that. I was grateful he asked.
I called him back a week later to talk about it. He did not answer. I called again, and texted, and called again. Six calls and four texts by Halloween.
He did not answer one of them. Jen, his wife, answered a text once to say Kurt was working a lot of hours. I did not know then that it was not true.
I figured he had changed his mind about helping, and was too embarrassed to say so. I figured the farm would sit this year. I picked up extra shifts over Thanksgiving week to cover a coworker whose daughter was having a baby in Minneapolis.