The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

The Empty Shed

Rick and Brittany got home from Cancun on Wednesday. I knew because Brittany posted a picture of the airport in Minneapolis. Thursday, Rick signed for my envelope at the post office.

He came out to the farm that night after dark. I heard his truck on the gravel.

I knew the sound of that truck the way you know the sound of a door in your own house.

He didn’t come to the house. He drove straight to the machine shed and left his headlights on. I watched him from the kitchen window walk into that shed and stand there.

I put on my jacket and went out to him.

He had the receipt in his hand. He had a tan from Mexico.

In the yard light he looked older than I remembered, like the tan was sitting on top of somebody who hadn’t been sleeping.

“You had no right, Tammy,” he said.

He didn’t yell it. That almost scared me more. Rick always yelled when he was mad. This was something else. He said it the way you’d say it to somebody at a funeral.

“It’s in my name, Rick,” I said. “Both titles. And you had three years.”

“You couldn’t wait till I got home?”

“I texted you on Tuesday. You read it at 10:14 in the morning. I gave you till Friday. I gave you two ways out, Rick. You didn’t take either one.”

He looked down at the receipt. He read the bottom of it, the “Paid in full,” for a long time. His jaw worked like he was chewing something that wouldn’t go down.

“Who’s got it?”

“Jake Lindgren. Arnie’s grandson. He paid a fair price.”

Rick laughed once, and it wasn’t a laugh. “Arnie. Of course it was Arnie.”

Then he folded the receipt up, very carefully, and put it in his shirt pocket.

He walked past me to his truck. He didn’t slam the door. He just backed around and drove off.

I stood in the empty shed for a while after his taillights were gone. I felt a lot of things.

I didn’t feel like I’d won anything. I felt like I’d finally set down something heavy that I’d been carrying in both arms.

What Deb Heard at the Elevator

The next week at school, Deb from the kitchen pulled me aside by the dish machine. Her husband farms east of town and buys his seed from Rick. Or he used to.

“Tammy, I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said. “But Mark says Rick’s been calling everybody, asking them to prepay for next year. In April. Nobody prepays in April.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I said, “Oh,” and went back to scraping trays.

But I thought about it all afternoon. A seed dealer asking for next year’s money in April, before this year’s crop was even in the ground, was a man in trouble. And a man in trouble does not go to Cancun.

Unless he does it so nobody will know he’s in trouble.

I didn’t call anybody. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my business anymore, and I’d spent three years learning not to make it my business.

But I kept thinking about how old he looked under the yard light.