The Photo I Slid in His Card

The text came in while I was standing in my machine shed with my palm flat on the cold steel of a loader that had not turned over in ten years.

I felt the phone buzz against my chest. I did not reach for it. I kept my hand where it was, on that cold dead metal.

Patsy read it to me from the kitchen doorway. She had her reading glasses pushed up in her hair and a dish towel over her shoulder.

“Dad wants three thousand dollars from each of us,” she said. “For the cruise. His and Mom’s fiftieth. He’s asking all four of us kids.”

I did not answer. I looked at the loader instead.

It sat where it had sat for a decade. Cab folded over, one rubber track slipped off the sprocket, the whole left side caved in like a pop can somebody stepped on.

Patsy came out and stood beside me on the concrete. She knew what I was looking at. She had been looking at it for ten years too.

“You don’t have to say anything right now,” she said.

But I did. I just did not know yet what it was going to be.

The Day I Lent It

I bought that loader new in the spring of 2016. A compact track loader, the kind that rides on rubber tracks instead of tires.

Tracks float over soft ground without tearing it up. That matters in creek bottom country, where half my acres are low and wet most of April.

It was sixty eight five off the lot in Topeka. I remember the number the way you remember a birthday.

By the time I bolted on a grapple and a smooth bucket and paid the sales tax, I was into it for right at seventy thousand dollars.

That is real money in eastern Kansas. That is a year of a man’s sleep.

I financed it over five years. I made every payment on the first of the month like it was the church offering.

I needed that machine. I run a cow calf herd and some milo and beans, and a track loader is a set of hands that never gets tired.

Merle called me the week after I brought it home. My father in law. Patsy’s dad.

“Let me run your new toy for a weekend,” he said. “I got a brush line gone wild on the creek. I’ll fill the tank and buy you a steak.”

You do not tell your wife’s father no. Not when you have sat at his table eight Christmases.

Not when he walks his daughter past you every Sunday at the Methodist church in town and shakes your hand in the parking lot.

So I trailered it over on a Friday morning and left it in his lot by the shed.

I waved at him from the truck. He was already climbing in the cab, grinning, before I had the trailer unhooked.

I never trailered that machine home under its own power again.