The Sunflowers on Grandpa’s Twenty Acres

April Fifteenth

Before I planted a single seed, I went to see Tiffany myself. It was a Thursday afternoon. She lived in a rented trailer house on the edge of town, with a horse trailer parked in the side yard and Addie’s bicycle lying in the grass.

She opened the door and saw me and almost shut it again. She didn’t. She stood there with her arms crossed.

“If you’re here to collect,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said. “Can I come in?”

We sat at her little kitchen table. There was a stack of bills on the corner of it, and a notice from the light company on top, and I tried not to look at it.

“I’m not going to charge you anything,” I said. “Not one dime. Not for the two years, not for anything. I need you to hear that.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

“But I need the horses off the ground by April fifteenth,” I said. “That’s two weeks. I’m going to plant it. All of it.”

“Plant it in what?” she said.

“Sunflowers,” I said.

She stared at me like I had lost my mind. Then she laughed, a short, ugly laugh, the kind people laugh when they are trying not to cry.

“You’re kicking my horses out for flowers,” she said.

“I’m taking my land back,” I said. “I’m sorry about how it’s happening. I’m not sorry that it’s happening. Ben will help you find a place. He’s already made calls.”

She did not answer. I got up and went to the door. Addie was sitting on the front step, drawing in the dirt with a stick, and she looked up at me.

“Is Biscuit going away?” she said.

I knelt down in front of her. “Biscuit is going to a new barn for a while,” I said. “Your mom will take good care of him. She always does.”

Addie nodded. She went back to her stick. I walked to my car and sat there in the driveway for a long minute before I could start it.

The Move

Ben found her a place, a boarding barn on the far side of the county, run by an older couple who had known their dad. They gave her a deal. Two hundred a head for pasture, with a break if she cleaned stalls on weekends.

It was still eight hundred dollars a month she did not have. She took a second job, nights, at the convenience store out on the highway. I heard that from Ben’s mother, who heard it from someone at church.

On April fourteenth, the day before the deadline, Tiffany came out with a borrowed truck and her trailer and loaded the horses one at a time. Ben went to help. I stayed home. I thought that was kinder.

Ben said she did not speak to him the whole time, except to tell him to watch Smoke’s back legs. He said the last one she loaded was Biscuit, and Addie led him up the ramp herself and stood inside the trailer with him for a long time, with her face pressed against his neck.

Then they drove away, and the twenty acres were empty for the first time in two years.