Three Summers in the Corn

Darren

He was standing at the coffee island with his back to me, in his feedlot clothes. He’d gotten a ride in with somebody. I could see the borrowed pickup idling outside, not his.

He turned around and saw me and his face did something I’d never seen it do in nineteen years of knowing him. He looked like a man who’d been caught.

“Angie,” he said.

“Darren.”

“He doing okay?”

“He’s stacking hay for Vern Pohlman every night to earn back the truck you sold.”

“I heard.” He looked down at his coffee. “Everybody’s heard. Guys at the yard heard. My sister heard. Pastor stopped me at the post office.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d decided a long time ago, about the divorce and everything after, that I wasn’t going to be the one who said the mean thing. It was a rule I made for Caleb’s sake. Some days it was the only thing I was proud of.

So I just waited. And after a minute, he told me.

“Bank took my truck in April,” he said.

I hadn’t known. Nobody had.

“I got behind after my hours got cut at the yard. They came and got it out of the driveway on a Thursday night. Then they sold it at the auction in Sioux Center and it went for nothing, and they sent me a letter saying I still owed them twenty-nine hundred and some, and if I didn’t settle it they’d garnish my wages.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t a laugh. “I’ve been riding in with Tom since April. I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want Caleb to know his dad couldn’t keep a truck.”

“So you sold his.”

“I told myself it was mine,” he said. “The title had my name on it. I told myself I’d pay him back by Christmas. That he’d understand.” He shook his head. “Then he came to the door and I couldn’t look at him, Ange. I said that thing about the receipt. I don’t even know where it came from. I just wanted him to stop looking at me.”

I believed him. That was the hard part. I’d been married to that man for eleven years, and I knew what he sounded like when he was lying, and he wasn’t.

I put my coffee down on the counter.

“I can’t fix this for you, Darren,” I said. “But I’ll tell you where he is every night. And I’ll tell you he’s never said one bad word about you. Not to me, not to Vern, not to anybody. He told me not to talk about you.”

Darren closed his eyes.

“Four thirty to eight thirty,” I said. “Saturdays all day. You know the road.”

And I went to work.