The Truck Under the Blue Tarp

A Sunday in September

Lars Quade died on the second Sunday of last September, at seventy-two, in his recliner, with the Twins on and the sound turned low.

I had made a peach crisp and was bringing him a bowl. I said his name from the kitchen doorway, because he hadn’t answered when I said the game was getting out of hand, and then I knew. His glasses were pushed up on his forehead. His hand lay open on the armrest like he’d just set something down.

In a farm town the funeral is a kind of harvest of its own. Three hundred and ten people signed the guest book at Bethany. The church women put out ham sandwiches and three kinds of bars. Burl Kenyon, who had drunk coffee with my husband at the same cafe table for forty-one years, shook my hand a long time and could not say a word.

And I noticed, because I was the kind of woman who noticed, that my son-in-law stood at the back of the sanctuary by the guest book the entire service. He wouldn’t sit in the family pew. Annika went up front with the kids, and he stood there in his one dark suit with his hands folded, looking at the floor.

He was gone before the sandwiches came out. Annika said later that a job had come in at the shop, a hail-damaged pickup with the insurance adjuster waiting. I nodded.

But I remember standing in the fellowship hall with a paper plate in my hand, with three hundred people there to say goodbye to my husband, and thinking, well. Of course.

That is the kind of thing I thought about Travis Rutten. Of course.