The Buyer at the Machine Shed Door

“Oh, Jody,” she said. “Yes. Yes, you can.”

Karen came over that afternoon with her phone and a pan of scotcheroos, because in our family nobody comes to a crisis empty handed.

We sat at my kitchen table with the window cracked. I could hear Savannah’s music upstairs. She was singing along, a little off key, to something on the radio.

Savannah had met Karen exactly once, at the funeral, in a receiving line with two hundred people in it. Karen goes by her married name on Facebook and her picture is a walleye she caught on Lake Minnewaska in 2019. We were not worried.

“What do I say?” Karen asked. She had her reading glasses on the end of her nose and the phone held out at arm’s length, the way we both do now.

I told her to say just what a buyer would say. She typed, “Is the tractor still available?” Savannah answered in four minutes.

“Yes! Runs great. My boyfriend’s dad restored it. Can show it Saturday afternoon.”

My boyfriend’s dad restored it. She knew exactly whose tractor it was. She had written it down for strangers as a selling point.

“Ask if she’ll take sixteen,” I said. Karen typed it. The answer came right back: “Firm at 18. I have other people interested.”

“I bet she does,” Karen said. I told her to ask what time on Saturday, and we both sat there watching the little dots.

“Two o’clock works. It’s in the red shed, you’ll see it from the road. Bring cash please.”

Karen typed “Sounds good, see you then,” and set the phone face down on the table like it was hot.

Then she said, “I want to come Saturday. I want to bring Dad’s old baseball bat.”

I reminded her that we were Lutherans. She said Lutherans have bats. I said not for that, and she put her phone back in her purse and ate a scotcheroo instead.

That week was the longest week I have had since the funeral. I went to work, I came home, I made supper, and I watched the stairway.

Every morning at seven fifteen, Savannah came down the outside stairs on her way to the clinic, and every morning she waved at me through the kitchen window and called, “Morning, Jody!” the way she always did.

I waved back. I want to tell you I was cold to her, but I was not. I waved, and I smiled, and I watched her get in her little car, and I felt sick.

Trent was gone before either of us. His crew was wiring a new hog barn over in Stevens County and they were pulling ten hour days to get it done before the ground froze.

He came home after dark every night with his hands raw and his coat smelling like cold concrete. He would stop in my kitchen on the way up, the way he has since he was a little boy, and open my refrigerator and stand in front of it.

“Anything good in here, Ma?” he would say. That week I told him scotcheroos, his aunt had brought them, and when he asked what Aunt Karen was over for, I said just visiting, which was the first lie I had told my son in years.

Three times that week I almost told him. Once on Tuesday, when he asked if I had been out to the shed lately. Once on Wednesday, when he fell asleep on my couch watching the weather. Once on Thursday, when he said, out of nowhere, “Ma, do you ever think about selling stuff of Dad’s?”