The Town Girl Who Bought the Farm Back

Merle Hansen waited until I pulled the suction out of his mouth. He was eighty-one, a retired corn and cattle man from out past Gibbon, and he had been in my chair every six months for nine years.

“Your father-in-law’s been talking at the co-op,” he said. He said it kindly, the way you tell a man his tailgate is down.

I had my scaler in my right hand and his chart open on the screen. I set the scaler down on the tray. “Talking about what, Merle?”

He looked up at the ceiling tiles for a while. Then he told me, because he was the kind of man who figured a woman ought to know what was being said about her in a room she could not walk into.

“Walt says he wasn’t about to sell the place to his boy,” Merle said. “Says the boy married a town girl, and she’d have it chopped into lots by Christmas.”

The little radio on the counter was playing the gospel station out of Hastings. I remember that. I remember the clip on his paper bib had come loose on one side, and I reached over and fixed it before I said anything at all.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said.

“I didn’t believe it, for what it’s worth,” Merle said. “I’ve known you since you had braces.”

He had. My dad ran a gas station on Second Avenue in Kearney for thirty years, and half the farmers in Buffalo County had filled up there and watched me do my homework on the counter by the jerky.

I was a town girl. That part was true. I grew up four blocks from the high school, with a sidewalk out front and a streetlight outside my bedroom window, and I did not know a heifer from a steer until I was nineteen.

I finished Merle’s cleaning. I did a good job on it, too, because my hands know how to keep working when the rest of me has stepped out of the room.

Then I walked him to the front desk, wrote “six months” on his appointment card, and went into the supply closet and stood there with the door shut until my face felt like my own again.