The Pumpkin Patch That Filled a School Bus

About two o’clock things settled. The kids were muddy and happy and starting to slow down. Mrs. Becker set them up at the washtubs in a line, and the room moms helped with soap, and Kim passed out the apple bars and the juice boxes, and for the first time all afternoon it got quiet enough to hear the wind in the windbreak.

I went over to the hydrant to refill the tubs. Courtney was there, trying to rinse her sneakers off under the spigot. It wasn’t going well. They were not white anymore and they were never going to be white again.

“Here,” I said. I handed her a scrub brush from the bucket. “Use this. Hold them upside down.”

She took it. She scrubbed for a while without saying anything. Then she said, still scrubbing, “My grandparents had a farm.”

I didn’t know that. In seven years she had never once mentioned it.

“Over by Marshfield,” she said. “Dairy. Forty cows. We’d go out there Sundays. My mom grew up there and couldn’t wait to get out, and I think I just caught it from her. That it was something to get away from.”

“Lot of people did,” I said.

“In fourth grade we had to bring something for show-and-tell about our family. My grandma gave me a jar of her pickles. And a girl in my class said my coat smelled like cows.” She turned the sneaker over and scrubbed the sole.

“It did, too. I’d worn it out there that weekend. Everybody laughed. And I went home and asked my mom if we could stop going out there on Sundays.”

“Did you stop?” I asked her, as gently as I knew how.

“Mostly. My grandpa died when I was thirteen and they sold the cows. I didn’t go to the auction. I told my mom I had a dance thing.” She stopped scrubbing. “I didn’t have a dance thing.”

I didn’t say anything. I’ve found that when somebody is telling you the true thing, it’s best not to get in the way of it.

“I wanted Brody to have the nice version,” she said. “I wanted him to have the one with the gift shop. So nobody would ever look at him the way they looked at me. I know how that sounds.”

“It sounds like a mother,” I said.

She looked at me then. Really looked, maybe for the first time.

“I was trying to protect him from this,” she said, and she waved the scrub brush at the patch, at the kids at the washtubs, at Roger leaning on the tractor tire eating an apple bar. “And look at him.”

We both looked at him. Brody was standing on a straw bale, which was against the rules, explaining to three other kids that his grandpa could fix anything, and that this was his farm, and that he was going to be a farmer and also a policeman.

“He’s not embarrassed,” I said.

“No,” she said. “He’s the opposite of embarrassed.” She laughed a little, and wiped her eye with the back of her wrist, because her hands were wet. “He’s been telling everybody in the class about this all week. Mrs. Becker had to tell him to stop talking about pumpkins during reading.”

I sat down on the edge of the water trough.

“I owe you an honest word too,” I said. “When you told me you’d booked that place, I was hurt. And I’ll tell you I didn’t do any of this just for those kids. Part of me wanted you to see it. I don’t know if that was right.”