The Sunflowers on Grandpa’s Twenty Acres

The Offer

Then she did something I did not expect. She looked out across the field, at all those families, at all those children.

“Kylie,” she said. “I came to ask you something.”

I waited.

“I can’t pay you back,” she said. “Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. But I’ve got Biscuit. He’s the gentlest horse in Missouri. He’s carried every kid I ever taught to ride.”

She looked back at me.

“Let me give pony rides,” she said. “Every weekend this field’s open. For the kids. Free. Down the edge here, on the grass, so nobody tramples your flowers. I’ll bring him every Saturday and Sunday. I’ll walk him myself.”

I looked at Biscuit, half asleep in the sun, with a sunflower petal stuck in his mane. I looked at Addie, who was holding her breath.

“Free,” I said.

“Free,” Tiffany said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. I laughed so hard Sam looked up at me, and then Tiffany started laughing too, standing there by the fence with tears on her face.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s the whole point.”

Pony Rides

She gave the first ride ten minutes later. A little girl in a pink dress, maybe five years old, whose mother lifted her up onto Biscuit’s back while Tiffany held the rope and Addie walked beside him with her hand on the little girl’s knee.

By the end of the afternoon, there was a line. Twenty kids, then thirty, waiting along the fence for their turn on an old brown horse who never once flicked an ear in complaint.

Sam rode last. Tiffany put him up herself and held him steady with one hand on his back.

“You hold the mane,” she told him. “Not too tight. He knows what he’s doing.”

Sam rode all the way to the end of the field and back, grinning so wide I could see every one of his baby teeth. When he came back, Grandpa was standing at the edge of the sunflowers, leaning on Ben’s arm, watching.

“Well, look at that,” Grandpa said. “A cowboy.”

She came back every weekend in July. Every Saturday and every Sunday, rain or shine, with Biscuit and Addie and a bucket of carrots. She still drove forty minutes to the boarding barn every night to feed the other three. She still worked nights at the convenience store.

Nobody ever paid her for a pony ride. Somebody put a coffee can out on a fence post the second weekend, with a piece of masking tape that said “For Biscuit,” and by the end of the month there was almost three hundred dollars in it.

She tried to give it to us. I wouldn’t take it. Neither would Ben. She used it on the boarding bill.