The Cookie at Grandma’s Table

The man who smoothed things over

I should tell you about Nick, because people always ask where he was.

My husband is thirty-six. He sells seed corn and soybean seed for a company out of Des Moines, which means he spends most of the year in his pickup driving from farm to farm with a laptop and a thermos. Farmers like him because he tells them the truth about a hybrid even when it costs him the sale.

He is the kindest man I know. He is also the son of Diane Fritz, and for ten years he had done the thing so many good sons do.

He smoothed it over.

“She doesn’t mean anything by it, Ames,” he would say on the drive home. “That’s just how Mom is. She grew up different.”

He meant it. He was not being weak. He was trying to keep a family in one piece, and he believed, the way a lot of men do, that if he stayed calm enough, long enough, everyone would eventually settle down.

He talked to her about the allergy more than once. I heard one of those talks through a screen door. She told him she had raised him and his sister on peanut butter sandwiches and they had turned out just fine.

He came back to the car and said, “I think she gets it now.”

She did not get it. And that Sunday in October, he was six miles away in the cab of a combine, with his phone in the cup holder and the roar of the header in his ears.