The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For

The bibs were short, though. Ev was five feet eight and Nate is six foot three. If I handed them over as they were, the cuffs would sit halfway up his shins, and he would go out on the first morning of his big year looking like a boy in his brother’s hand-me-downs.

I could have let that be. He would have worn them. He’d have said they fit fine.

Instead, I put on my glasses and turned on the lamp over the Singer, and I took out my seam ripper.

Ev had turned those cuffs up twice, once in 1989 and once in 2004, each time because he decided they were dragging in the mud. I found both old hem lines, faded pale in the denim like the ghosts of two other years. I picked every stitch out, careful as a woman opening a letter.

There was better than three inches in that hem once I had it pressed flat. I let every bit of it out. I ran the new hem by hand on a long running stitch so it could come up again if it ever needed to, because I am a woman who has learned that nothing you give away should be sewn in so tight it cannot be changed.

I lengthened the straps by four inches and moved the buttons. It took until after two in the morning, with the kitchen radio on low, a man in Sioux City playing old hymns for people who can’t sleep, and I sang along with the ones I knew.

At the last I laid the bibs out on the table, and I looked at the pencil in the chest pocket. I left it.

I took the notebook from the table and slipped it into my own robe pocket, and I went up to bed. I slept better than I had in six months.

Nate came at twelve forty on Sunday. He had on a collared shirt and he had brought Kelsey and little Ivy, who stayed in the truck with the window cracked and her face pressed against the glass, wearing a pink coat and watching me with great seriousness.

I was waiting at the kitchen door. I’d had the bibs folded over my arm since eleven.

“Mrs. Hartwig,” he said.

“Joyce is fine.” I had not said that to anyone under forty in my life. “Come in the house, Nate. You can leave the cap on.”

He stepped into the kitchen and stopped. He looked at what I was holding. They were folded over my forearm, hickory stripe up, and a band of dark, unfaded blue showing at the cuff.

“Those are the ones,” I said. “I let them down. Go try them on in the mudroom, over your jeans. Go on.”

He took them without a word. He went into the mudroom and shut the door, and I stood in my kitchen with my hands folded and listened to the snaps. A zipper that sticks. A grunt, and then a quiet, as though he were standing very still.

When he came out the straps sat right and the cuffs touched the tops of his boots. For the first time since I’d known him, the overalls looked like they belonged to somebody who could move in them.

“They fit,” he said. His voice came out sideways. “How did they fit?”

“They didn’t, until two o’clock this morning.” I tried to sound brisk. “I let the legs and the straps down. If they’re still short in the rise, you come tell me. I can do more.”