The Pumpkin Patch That Filled a School Bus

She left. I heard her car go down the lane, and I stood there and wiped my dry hands on the dish towel, and then I cut the apple bars, because they don’t cut right once they cool all the way.

That was a Thursday in the first week of October.

I should tell you about Courtney, so you don’t think she’s a monster. She isn’t. She’s twenty-nine, she’s pretty in that careful way that takes some work in the morning, and she’s an aide in the first-grade wing of the elementary school in town. The children love her. I have seen them run to hug her at the grocery store.

She and Kyle met at a wedding in Stevens Point seven years ago. She grew up in town, in a split-level on a street with sidewalks. Her dad sold insurance and her mother worked at the clinic. She has always been polite to me. Polite is not the same as warm, but I had decided a long time ago that polite was plenty to build on.

What I had never figured out was why my farm seemed to make her so uncomfortable. She would stand on the porch when the rest of us went out to look at the calves. She kept a pair of slip-on shoes in her car just for walking from the car to my door.

When Brody came over she brought a change of clothes in a plastic bag, the way you would for a child going to a swimming pool.

I had always told myself she was just tidy. That some people are.

That night Kyle called. He drives milk for the co-op and he’d been on the road since four in the morning, so I could hear how tired he was before he said anything.

“Courtney said she talked to you,” he said, and I told him she did.

“She said you were really good about it.” He paused. “Were you really good about it, Mom, or were you being good about it?”

Kyle has known me thirty years. He knows there is a difference.

“I said all right,” I told him. “I meant all right.”

“It’s her call, Mom. She does most of the stuff with him. She makes the doctor appointments and the school stuff and all of it. I’m gone at four in the morning. I don’t feel like I get to overrule her on a pumpkin.”

He wasn’t wrong. That was the part that stung. He wasn’t wrong at all.

“I’m not asking you to overrule anybody,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

When I hung up, Roger was sitting at the table with the farm paper and his reading glasses down on his nose. He’d heard all of it. Roger hears everything and says about a third of it.

“You could just take him yourself,” he said. “Some Saturday when she’s got a shower or something. Bring him out, let him pick one. She’d never know.”

“She’d know. Brody would tell her. He’s six. He tells everybody everything.”

“So she’d know.”

“Roger, I’m not going to go around that boy’s mother.”

He looked at me over his glasses for a while. Then he nodded and went back to his paper, because he knew I was right, and because thirty-one years of marriage has taught him when a thing is settled.

I didn’t sleep well. I lay there and listened to the furnace kick on and thought about the patch.