The Sunflowers on Grandpa’s Twenty Acres

The Gate

It was about three o’clock, bright and hot, when I saw them.

I was standing in the sunflowers near the road with Sam’s hand in mine, talking to a woman who had driven all the way from Boonville. Sam tugged my hand and pointed.

“Mama,” he said. “A horse.”

I turned around. Coming along the edge of the field, on the grassy strip between the sunflowers and the fence, was Tiffany. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Addie was beside her. And between them, on a lead rope, was one brown horse.

It was Biscuit. Old, gentle, sleepy Biscuit, with his head low, ambling along between the two of them like he had never left.

I did not move. I did not know what to do. Tiffany had not spoken to me since April. She had not come to Ben’s mother’s for Mother’s Day. I had heard she was working nights and weekends and was not sleeping much.

She walked right up to me. She stopped a few feet away. She looked tired. She looked thinner than she had at Easter. Addie was holding Biscuit’s rope and looking up at me with her mother’s eyes.

“Hi, Kylie,” Tiffany said.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked out at the field. All that yellow. All those people. Her jaw worked, the way Ben’s does when he is trying to say something hard.

“I came out last week,” she said. “Before they opened. I sat in the car on the road for an hour. I couldn’t make myself get out.”

“You could have,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I couldn’t.”

What Tiffany Said

She told me then, standing there at the edge of the sunflowers, with Biscuit cropping grass beside her and Addie and Sam crouched down looking at a ladybug on a leaf.

“I lost that barn the same month Mike and I signed the papers,” she said. “The same week. I had nothing, Kylie. No truck. No house. No money. I had a nine-year-old and four horses and a trailer I couldn’t pull.”

“I know,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Those horses were the only thing I had left that was mine. The only thing I had ever been good at. If I lost them, I didn’t know who I was anymore.”

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

“When Ben asked for the money,” she said, “I didn’t have it. I didn’t have a hundred and fifty dollars. I didn’t have fifty. And I was so ashamed I couldn’t say it. So I made you the bad guy instead. In front of Mom. In front of everybody.”

“In front of Addie,” I said quietly.

She closed her eyes. “In front of Addie,” she said.

We stood there a long time. A family walked past us toward the gate, the little boy carrying a single sunflower head bigger than his own face.

“I’m sorry,” Tiffany said. “That’s what I came to say. I’m sorry. I was wrong, and I was proud, and you didn’t deserve any of it.”

“Thank you,” I said. I meant it. I didn’t say anything else, because there was nothing else that needed saying.