The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

“Bud, take that off a minute,” my son-in-law said from the kitchen doorway, and the engine noise my grandson had been making for ten straight minutes stopped like somebody had shut off the key.

Brody stood by the kitchen island inside the combine I had built him. His face was pink from running laps.

One of the flashlights in the header was still on, throwing a little circle of light on the refrigerator door.

Jared had his tie pulled loose and his car keys still in his hand.

He sells pharmaceuticals for a company out of Des Moines, and he covers most of northwest Iowa. He had been on the road since five that morning, and it showed.

He set a plastic shopping bag on the counter. Then he reached into it and pulled out a red superhero suit with foam muscles sewn into the chest and a black mask clipped to the hanger.

The price tag was still hanging off the sleeve. Thirty-nine dollars and ninety-seven cents.

I remember that number because I could read it from where I sat, and because I had spent about eleven dollars on the combine, not counting my time.

“Got you something, bud,” Jared said. He smiled when he said it. He was trying, in his way. “This is what the big kids wear.”

Brody looked at the suit. Then he looked down at the green cardboard around his middle, and the yellow wheels I had painted on the sides, and the little grain tank on his back.

“I’m a combine,” he said.

Jared crouched down to his level. He did it kindly enough. He has always talked to that boy at eye level, I will give him that, even when I did not like what came out.

“I know you are,” he said. “And it’s a nice box. But you don’t want to walk down Main Street in a box, buddy. The other kids are going to laugh. It’s embarrassing.”

He said that last word in front of me. I don’t think he meant it for me.

I think he forgot I was sitting there, or forgot who had built the thing. But I heard it, and so did Brody.

My grandson looked at me. Then he looked at his dad. Then his chin started to go, and he cried the quiet way, the way a six-year-old cries when he is trying very hard not to.

My daughter, Amy, looked at her plate. She had a fork in her hand and she held onto it and did not look up.

My wife, Darlene, put her hand on my knee under the table and left it there.

I want to tell this straight, because I have had a year to think about it, and I am not the hero of every part.