The Buyer at the Machine Shed Door

Savannah slid the machine shed door open, glanced up from her phone, and saw that the buyer she had been texting all week was standing right beside her. It was me.

I was standing there in my navy wool coat and my church dress, holding my purse with both hands like it had money in it. It did not. It had a lipstick, a roll of mints and the church bulletin.

Behind her, inside the red shed, sat my late husband’s tractor. A 1966 Ford 4000, blue with the gray fenders, the one Arlo spent three winters putting back together piece by piece.

She had washed it. That was the first thing I noticed. She had washed it for the sale, and she had done a good job, and somehow that made it worse.

“Jody,” she said.

Her hand stayed on the sliding door, like she might pull it shut again and make me disappear. Her phone buzzed in her other hand. Another buyer, probably. She had five by then.

“I brought my purse,” I said. “I figured that was what you’d want to see.”

But I am getting ahead of myself, and my sister Karen says I always do that, so let me go back to the Sunday it started.

My name is Jody Nordstrom. I am fifty years old and I manage the front office at a dental practice in town, which means I spend my weekdays telling people their insurance does not cover what they hoped it covered.

We live on a small farm in west-central Minnesota, a quarter section that Arlo’s grandfather bought, though most of the tillable ground has been rented out to the neighbor for twenty years now.

What we kept is the yard. The white farmhouse, the old dairy barn that leans a little more every spring, the grove, and the red machine shed Arlo put up the year our son was born.

Arlo died two years ago this November. His heart, at fifty one, out in the yard on a Tuesday afternoon with the leaf blower still running. I found him. I do not talk about that part much.

Our son Trent is twenty five. He is in his second year as an electrician’s apprentice with an outfit out of Morris, and he works harder than any boy I know, which is not something I say lightly about anybody.

Trent and his girlfriend Savannah live upstairs. When Arlo’s mother was alive, we made the second floor of the farmhouse into a little apartment for her, with its own outside stairway and a kitchenette, and after she passed it sat empty for years.

When Trent and Savannah started getting serious last year, he asked if they could rent it. I said four hundred a month, utilities included, and I have never raised it. I liked having them close. I liked hearing feet on the floor above me at night.

Savannah is twenty four. She works the front desk at the clinic in town and does hair out of her friend’s salon on Saturdays. She talks fast and laughs loud and she can get a stain out of anything.

I liked her. I want to be honest about that, because some people tell this story like she was the villain from the start, and she was not. I liked her fine. I just did not know her very well yet.

That first Sunday in October I was at church. Second service, then I stayed to help pack up the coffee hour, because Lois Engen had a hip replacement and somebody had to wash the big urn.