The Widow Who Planted Across the Road

We said grace. Then Randy did not pick up his fork.

“Melissa,” he said. “I need to say something before we eat, or I won’t be able to eat.”

The whole table went quiet.

“The bank was on me,” he said. “That’s true, but it’s not the reason. The reason is I wanted Luke to have a place to come home to, and I wanted it settled before planting so he’d stay. And I told myself the check was the kind thing. That you’d be glad to be done with it. That a widow didn’t want to be farming with her husband’s brothers.”

He looked down at his plate. “That was a lie I told myself because it made it easier. It was the wrong day, and it was the wrong way, and Lori told me so, and I didn’t listen.”

He stopped. Lori put her hand on his arm.

“Then I watched you lift those bags,” he said. “The first day. And I stood out there with Luke and I thought, that’s Jeff’s wife, out there by herself, and I’m standing here watching. And I couldn’t think of one single thing to say for myself.”

I sat there with my hands in my lap.

“I’m sorry,” Randy said. “If you want the house back, it’s yours. Luke and I already talked about it. He’ll find something.”

Luke nodded across the table.

I looked at them, the whole table full of them. These were the people I had spent my whole grown life with.

These were the people who had come to the hospital when Abby was born, and who had sat with me in the emergency room the night Jeff broke his wrist, and who had stood around the grave two months before.

“I don’t want the house back,” I said. “I have a house. It’s across the road, and it has eighty acres with it, and I’m going to finish planting it tomorrow.”

Randy nodded slowly.

“But I would like to come to Sunday dinner,” I said.

“And I would like Abby to keep riding with Luke if he’ll have her. And when that eighty needs harvesting, I would like to rent your combine at a fair rate instead of hiring somebody from Superior.”

“You’ll use it free,” Randy said.

“I’ll pay what it’s worth,” I said. “Jeff would have. You know he would have.”

For the first time since March, Randy laughed. “He would have argued with me about the rate for an hour,” he said. “Then he’d have paid it and bought me supper.”

That was when Abby, who had not said a word, took off Jeff’s seed cap and set it beside her plate.

Randy looked at the cap. He went very still. Then he reached over and touched the brim with one finger, the way you would touch something in a museum.

“I gave him that,” he said, and his voice broke right in half. “The year he started planting on his own. I bought it at the seed meeting. He was sixteen. He wore it every spring for thirty years.”

“He still had it on the hook,” Abby said. “Mom almost forgot it, but Aunt Lori remembered.”