The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

He walked me out to the trailer and we stood a minute in the lot the way men do, not saying much, the sale barn smell of manure and diesel and burnt coffee all around us, and he told me the Manhattan outfit that bought my six ran them on good grass and preg-checked twice a year, and that was a kindness, him telling me that, and he knew it was.

I drove home with an empty trailer again. The pasture looked wrong that evening, ten head short, the way a mouth looks wrong with a tooth gone.

Hope met me on the porch.

“How much,” she said.

“Enough,” I said. “Enough for the supper and enough left over besides.”

I had decided about the left over on the drive home, somewhere around Strong City. I was not going to keep it. I was going to put it in the bank under Dale and Katie’s names, toward their first set of cows, because a young couple starting out needs a start a lot more than I needed to be made whole.

I did not tell Hope that part yet. I wanted to tell Dale first, after the wedding, when it would land soft instead of looking like a card I was playing.

Paying Every Cent

I drove to the lodge myself on a Friday and paid the whole bill at the front desk, in full, three weeks before the supper.

The girl at the desk printed it out and it came to nine thousand three hundred and forty dollars with the tax. I wrote the lodge a check off the cattle money and I asked her for a receipt marked paid in full.

Marcie happened to be there. She had come out to look at the flowers, she said, and she caught me at the desk folding the receipt into my shirt pocket.

“Oh, Wendell,” she said. “You did not have to come all the way out. I could have just added it to my account and settled up with you.”

“It is settled,” I said. “Paid in full. You will not see another dollar of it.”

She did not know quite what to do with that. She had wanted, I think, to carry it a while, to be the one who paid and then collected, to hold the paying over us for the length of the engagement.

“Well,” she said. “That is very responsible of you.”

“We said we would take care of it,” I said. “We take care of what we say.”

I tipped my cap to her and I left her standing by the flower samples, and I will tell you the truth, I did not feel one thing like a winner walking out to my truck. I felt like a man who was ten heifers lighter and three weeks from a party he was dreading.

Hope asked me that night if I had said anything to Marcie about the bridge club.

“No,” I said.

“Are you going to.”

“No,” I said. “I am not going to say a word to that woman about it.”

Hope looked at me a long moment over her reading glasses.

“You have got something cooking,” she said. “I have been married to you since I was twenty-two and I know when you have got something cooking.”

“I am going to give a toast,” I said. “At the rehearsal supper. That is all. Fathers of the groom give toasts.”

“Wendell.”

“It is a nice toast,” I said. “You will like it.”

She did not believe me, and she was right not to, but she let it go, which is its own kind of trust.