The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

There was Brian, who works at the implement dealer, and Mike, who drives a feed truck, and Mike’s brother Kevin, who could hang a header faster than anybody I have ever seen.

They worked for beer and my grandmother’s pie and would not take a dime.

On one side of the section road, rows of steel racks went up and then rows of dark glass on top of them, row after row, catching the sun.

On the other side of the road, our walls went up, one at a time, raw yellow lumber against the cedars.

Gene drove past every single day. He had to. The section road was the shortest way from his place to the highway.

He never once stopped. Not once all summer. He would lift two fingers off the steering wheel and keep going.

Cody kept working for him through all of it. They ran the planter together and sprayed together and hauled wheat together in July, and they talked about the weather and the price of fertilizer and not one other thing.

I asked Cody once how he could stand it. He was sitting on an overturned bucket in our framed-in kitchen, eating a sandwich, looking out the hole where the big window was going to go.

“He’s my dad,” Cody said. “He made a bad call and he knows it. He just can’t say it yet. I’m not going to make him say it by quitting on him. I’d rather wait.”

I married that man for a lot of reasons. That sandwich on that bucket was one of them, though I did not know it until right then.

In August, Gene’s old dog got sick. Duke was a red heeler, thirteen years old, the dog that had ridden in the pickup with Deb on every trip to town for most of his life.

Gene brought him into the clinic on a Tuesday afternoon, carrying him in his arms because Duke could not walk well anymore.

He did not know I would be working. Or maybe he did. It is a small clinic.

I took Duke from him at the counter and carried him back. It was his kidneys, the way it usually is with an old dog.

The doctor said we could give him fluids and buy him some weeks, but not many.

Gene sat in the waiting room for the two hours it took. When I brought Duke back out, wrapped in a clinic towel, Gene stood up so fast his knees cracked.

“He’s comfortable,” I told him. “He’ll feel better tonight than he has in a while. You can bring him back Thursday for more fluids, or I can show you how to do it at home.”

“Show me,” Gene said. “Deb would have wanted him home.”

So I sat down beside him in that waiting room with a bag of fluids and a line and showed him how to do it.

His hands shook a little. Big farmer’s hands, scarred across the knuckles, shaking over a needle.

When we were done he did not get up right away.

He sat with Duke across his lap and looked at the floor, and then he said, without looking at me, “Corn’s at four dollars, Haley. It costs me more than that to raise it.”