The Spring Grandma Rode in My Tractor

He looked at me then. I want to tell you that I felt good about it. I did not. I felt sick, and sad, and tired, and I wanted my baby.

“Jenna,” he said. “I took your corn.”

The scale house was so quiet you could hear the auger running outside.

“I was behind on the note,” he said. “I told myself it was Mom’s ground and it would come to me anyhow. I told myself a lot of things.” He swallowed. “None of them was true. It was your corn. I knew it was your corn when I drove the combine onto it.”

I did not know what to say. Nobody had told me what to say. I stood there with my hands in my jacket pockets and looked at my uncle, who had taught me to drive a stick shift when I was twelve, in this same town, in Grandpa’s old pickup.

“You said I would not be farming with a baby,” I said.

“I know I did.”

“I planted it with her this spring,” I said. “She was there every night. At the end of the field. With Ben.”

“I know,” Roger said. “I drove by.”

Then he reached into his back pocket and took out his checkbook. He set it on Mike’s counter and wrote a check, slow, and tore it out and held it out to me.

It was for eight thousand dollars.

“That is what you had in the ground,” he said. “Seed and fertilizer and spray. Mom told me. I sold a load off this scale at six this morning to cover it.” He was still holding it out. “The rest by next harvest. Sixteen thousand. I will bring it here, to this scale, so these same men see me do it.”

I looked at Grandma. She did not nod or shake her head. She left it to me, which was the hardest thing she did that whole year.

I took the check.

“Thank you,” I said. I meant it, and I did not, both at once. I folded it and put it in my jacket pocket next to my phone.

Roger nodded. He looked like he wanted to say something else, and then he looked at his mother, and then he did not.

“One more thing,” Grandma said to him. “Sunday dinner. Noon. You bring Sue and you bring your appetite. You are going to sit at my table and hold that baby and learn her name.”

“Her name is Maisie,” Roger said quietly. “Sue told me.”

“Then you will learn her face,” Grandma said. “Sunday.”

He nodded again. Then he put his cap back on and went out to move his truck, because the line had backed up behind us all the way to the highway and somebody was honking.

Mike handed me my ticket. My name was on it. Jenna Holm, printed plain at the top, and on the back, in Grandma’s handwriting, the rest of it.

“For what it is worth, Jenna,” Mike said, “I am sorry about last year.”

“You did not know,” I said.

“I should have asked,” he said. “I will ask from now on.”

Grandma was tired on the drive home. She sat with her purse in her lap and her eyes half closed, and I thought she had fallen asleep until we turned onto the gravel.

“You did well,” she said. “You did not gloat.”