The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
When I woke up, I looked across the road. The kitchen light was on in the home place, my old kitchen, and I could see a figure standing at the window.
I could not tell who it was. Then the light went off.
The second morning, I was carrying seed bags from the trailer to the planter when I heard boots on the gravel.
It was barely light. I turned around and saw Luke crossing the road, walking, not driving, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Behind him, at the edge of their field, his dad was standing by the pickup, watching him go.
Randy did not call him back. I remember that. He could have, and he did not.
Luke stopped at the end of my rows. He looked at the planter, and the tractor, and the stack of seed bags on the trailer, and then he looked at me.
He had his dad’s face and his uncle Jeff’s way of standing, with all his weight on one leg.
“Aunt Melissa,” he said.
“Morning, Luke.”
“Number six is skipping,” he said. “I could see it from over there yesterday. You’ve got a gap every few feet on that row.”
“I fixed it,” I said. “Bent finger.”
“Okay.” He looked at the bags again. Then he said, “Let me run the tractor. You haul seed. You’ll get twice as far.”
“Your dad needs you.”
“Uncle Scott’s running ours this morning,” he said. “Dad can run it after dinner. They’ll be fine.” He swallowed.
“I didn’t know about the funeral thing. The check. I didn’t know they were going to do it that day, or I’d have said something. I found out after.”
“I believe you.”
“I didn’t ask for the house,” he said. “I want you to know that. Dad offered it, and I said yes, because I didn’t think about where you’d go. I just didn’t think.”
He looked at his boots. “Uncle Jeff taught me to run a planter. On this same model. I was eleven.”
“I know,” I said. “I packed your lunch.”
He laughed, sort of. Then he climbed up into the cab, and Abby, who had been sitting in the buddy seat waiting, looked at him under the brim of that cap, and he looked at her.
“That’s his,” Luke said.
“I know,” Abby said.
“It looks good on you,” he said, and started the tractor.
Luke ran my planter all that morning, and I hauled seed.
I drove the pickup and the trailer to the end of the field when he signaled, and I lifted bags and he lifted bags, and we filled those boxes faster than I would have believed.
He planted straighter than I did. He planted straighter than Jeff did, if I am honest, and Jeff would have been the first to say so.
Around noon, I heard a diesel come down the gravel road from the east, and I looked up to see Scott pulling the partnership’s seed tender behind his pickup.
It was the big gray one with the conveyor, the one Jeff had bought at a dealer auction four years before, the one I had written the check for.