The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

“You never said,” Mom said.

“No. I never said.” He looked down at his hands. “I took your CRP money and I put it on the note. Both years. I told myself it was for the farm, and the farm was Dad’s, so it was all the same pocket. Then the third year wasn’t much better, and the fourth year I just did it because I’d done it before.”

He stopped. Mom waited. She was good at waiting.

“And I told myself you’d never miss what you never saw,” he said, and his voice cracked on it. “That’s the truth of it. I told myself you were 81 and you didn’t need much, and the farm needed it more.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “And then you asked me for some of it for that trip, right in front of Matt, and I was so ashamed I couldn’t look at you. So I said you’d waste it.”

“I stood in front of that picture yesterday,” Randy said. “And I thought, that is the face Dad was trying to see for thirty-one years. And I’m the one who kept it from her. Not the hail. Not the bank. Me.”

He reached into the envelope and took out a second piece of paper, folded in thirds. It was a sheet from a yellow legal pad, in his square farmer’s handwriting.

“Lisa and I sat up last night and did the numbers,” he said. “Twenty-eight thousand eight hundred. I can’t pay it all at once. I’d be lying if I said I could.”

He tapped the paper. “But I can pay you forty-eight hundred a year over and above the CRP. Six years. Sooner if the wheat makes. It’s all written down. I’ll sign it if you want me to.”

Mom unfolded the paper and read it. Then she folded it back up very carefully and set it on top of the check.

“And I’ll drive you to the FSA office on Thursday,” Randy said. “We’ll take the assignment off. It goes back in your name. Your money, your account, every October. I should have done that the first year.”

Mom looked at him for a long time. Then she reached across the table and put her hand over his, over those big hands that were Dad’s hands.

“Randall,” she said. “Why didn’t you just tell me the bank was after you?”

He did not answer right away. He was crying. My big brother, who had found our father on the floor of the shop and never said one word about it to anybody, was crying at the kitchen table in front of his mother and his little brother.

“Because Dad never would have,” he said finally. “Dad would have handled it.”

“Your father,” Mom said, “cried at this table over a bus ticket. Did you know that? He sat right where you’re sitting and cried because he had to send back the tickets for the ocean. Your father told me everything. That’s how we stayed married fifty-six years.”

Randy put his head down on his arms on the table. Mom stood up and came around and put her arms around his shoulders from behind, the way she used to when he was a boy doing homework at that same table.

“You’ll both stay for supper,” she said. It was not a question either.