The Combine Keys at Harvest Supper

“She called Brad,” Deb said. “He told her he couldn’t just leave work in the middle of the month, and why didn’t she hire somebody. Like it’s a lawn service. Kyle didn’t call back at all. She told me that at coffee and then she went and sat in her car a long time before she drove home.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Deb watched me a minute.

“I’m not telling you to go back,” she said. “I’d have done the same thing you did, maybe worse. I’m just telling you what’s so. That’s all.”

I’ll be honest, because there’s no use telling a story if you only tell the good parts of yourself. I wanted to go back every single morning.

Some mornings I sat at the stop sign at the corner of her section and my hands wanted to turn that wheel so bad I had to grip it.

But going back would have told her something I didn’t want her to believe. It would have told her the land could go anywhere she liked and Mark would still come running at harvest, because Mark always does.

It would have told her nineteen years was the kind of thing you could give away at supper and nothing would happen.

So I ran Arlen’s corn when it dried out, and I kept my mouth shut, and at night Marcy kept setting my plate by the window.

By the end of that week I had my own coffee cup in her cupboard.

It was a feed store mug that said nothing at all on it, but she called it Mark’s cup, and nobody else used it.

On Wednesday night, the eighth day, my phone rang at nine thirty. It was Elaine. I sat on the edge of my bed in Sanborn and looked at her name on the screen a long time before I answered it.

“Mark,” she said. Her voice was thin. “The bin fan on the big bin is making a noise. A grinding noise. I don’t know if I should shut it off or leave it run. Ron isn’t answering and I didn’t know who else to call.”

I could have said call Brad. I thought it. I didn’t say it. Instead I talked her through it on the phone, which switch on the panel, where the breaker was, how to tell if it was the bearing or just a piece of trash in the housing.

She went out in the dark with the phone and a flashlight, and it was a corn husk in the screen. She pulled it out and the noise stopped.

“Thank you,” she said, out of breath, standing in the yard. I could hear the fan running smooth behind her.

Then there was a long quiet on the line, long enough that I thought she might say something else. I waited.

“Goodnight, Mark,” was all she said, and she hung up.

I sat there holding the phone. It occurred to me that she had walked out alone across that yard in the dark at sixty-seven years old to fix a bin fan, and that nobody in Phoenix knew or would ever know.

And it occurred to me that I had been so busy being right that I had not once asked myself who checked on her at night.

The next morning I called Marcy before I went out. I asked if she’d mind driving over to Elaine’s sometime that day with some excuse, a loaf of bread, anything, just to lay eyes on her.