The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

What the Bridge Club Heard

The thing that got me was not the menu. It was Delmar Tubbs at the sale barn coffee counter the next Wednesday.

Delmar’s wife, Ina, plays bridge in Council Grove on Tuesday nights with a table full of ladies, and Marcie had joined that table the winter before, new in town from Kansas City.

“I hate to be the one,” Delmar said, stirring his coffee and not looking at me. “But Ina come home Tuesday and she was hot about it.”

I waited. You learn to wait around cattle and around bad news both.

“Your boy’s mother-in-law, the Kansas City woman,” he said. “She was going on at the table about the wedding. Said the groom’s people were a bunch of dirt farmers who did not understand how things were done. Said she was carrying the whole affair because you all were too cheap to do it right.”

I drank my coffee. It had gone cold while he talked, the way it does.

“Cheap,” I said.

“Her word,” Delmar said. “Ina told her to hush and Ina does not tell people to hush. I figured you would want to know it rather than not.”

I thanked him. I meant it. A man would rather hear it from Delmar at the coffee counter than feel it behind his back the rest of his life.

Cheap. I thought about that word all the way home with an empty trailer rattling behind me.

I am not a cheap man. I am a careful one, which is a different animal, and anybody who has run a cow-calf outfit through a drought and a cattle crash and a year the hay all molded knows the difference in his bones.

I had already told Marcie we would take care of it. I had given my word in front of Hope. I am not a man who gives his word and then goes small on it because his feelings got hurt at a card table.

So that was the thing. I was going to pay for the whole supper, every plate of prime rib, every string of lights. I had already decided that at the lodge.

The only question left was where the money was coming from, and how I wanted to feel when I handed it over.

Hope had supper on when I got in. I washed up and told her what Delmar told me, all of it, the word and the card table and the dirt-farmer part.

She set the dish towel down real slow.

“Are we still paying for it,” she said. It was not quite a question.

“We gave our word,” I said.

“We did,” she said. And then, “I would like to be there when you do.”