Two Children and One Home Place

Kurt made a sound by the counter that was almost a laugh.

“Nobody got anything,” Dale said. “That’s why you’re here.”

“I figured it was done.” She turned the cup in front of her a quarter turn. “I figured one of these Sundays you’d call and tell me how it was going to be. I wasn’t going to fight it. I couldn’t farm an acre of it from Colorado Springs, and everybody at this table knows that.”

“Then why did you come?” I said. It came out harder than I meant.

“Because Dad asked me to.” She looked at Dale. “He’s never asked me for anything. Not once. I wanted to see what it was.”

Dale cleared his throat. He took off his reading glasses and set them on the plat, on the creek forty.

“Spring of 2005,” he said. “The machine shed. You had your gloves on.”

I watched Renae’s face. I saw it go still, the way a pond does when the wind drops.

“You asked to run the planter,” he said, “and I said it was Kurt’s work. I said I wanted you to go see something. I’ve thought about that for twenty-one years, and I’m sorry. I should have asked you what you wanted. I decided it for you, and I called it a favor.”

For a long time, nothing. The percolator ticked. Out in the yard a pickup went by on the gravel, somebody’s, and none of us looked.

“I hung up the gloves,” Renae said. “On the nail by the door.”

“I know you did.”

“I figured, well, that’s that.” She smiled at the table, a small one. “I was seventeen. I got a scholarship to Iowa and I thought, all right, that’s what he wants, I’ll go be good at something else. And I am. I’m good at it. I’m a good nurse. But nobody ever asked me again.”

“We’re asking now,” Dale said.

“I know. I can tell.” She looked at me then, and her voice did not get louder, but it got more careful. “Can I say a thing, Mom? And can you not get that look?”

“What look?”

“That one. That’s the one.”

I did not know I had a look. I said I would try.

“When I call,” Renae said, “you give me the report. Who died, who’s in the hospital, how the beans did. Then you say, well, I won’t keep you. And you hang up.” She turned the cup again. “I don’t think you’ve asked me one question about my own life since Eli was born.”

I got up. I do not remember deciding to. I went to the sink and turned on the cold tap and stood there with the water running over the bottom of the dish pan, and looked out the window at the white field. Behind me nobody said a word.

When I turned the water off, Renae was looking past me at the wall. At the calendar.

“Mom,” she said. “What are the little R’s?”

There is no good way to say what you’ve done. I said it flat. “When you call, I mark it. In pencil. Every time.”

“Since when?”

“Since you moved to Colorado.”

“Why?”

“So I’d know,” I said, “how often.”