Five Cows and One Plate of Pie

The Night Before

I did not sleep much. I lay there listening to the wind work at the north side of the house, the way it does in November out here, like it has someplace to be and you are in the way.

I thought about calling Cody. I picked up my phone twice. Both times I put it back down, because I knew exactly how that call would go, and I knew that by the time I hung up he would have a story and I would be half sorry I asked.

I thought about Arlene Brandvik. When I was nineteen and newly married and did not know how to do anything, it was Arlene who showed me how to can tomatoes without blowing the lids.

She drove over with a box of jars and stayed until dark.

When my dad died four years ago, Arlene brought a ham and a pan of scalloped potatoes and sat at this same table and did not say much.

She just stayed, the way she had with the tomatoes. Some people know how to stay.

And Lyle. Lyle had his back go out two winters ago, the last winter Cody and I were married.

Cody fed his cows every morning from December to March, hauling hay and breaking ice and pouring cake out of a bucket. Lyle paid him, and paid him well.

Those cows knew Cody’s truck. They knew the rattle of that cake bucket.

That was the part I could not stop thinking about, lying in the dark. They would have walked right up to him.

Around three in the morning I got up and made coffee and sat at the table with the check face down in front of me.

I had already decided what I was going to do. I just needed it to get light.

The Porch

Saturday came up cold and gray, the kind of low sky that sits on the whole Panhandle like a lid.

I pulled my hair back in a ponytail and put on my navy fleece and got in my little tan car at 7:30.

The Brandvik place is two miles by road. You go south to the corner, east along the section line, and up their gravel drive past the cedar windbreak Lyle’s father planted after the dry years. I have driven it a thousand times.

I parked below the house. The house is white, and the long gray porch has a slatted bench that Lyle built for Arlene on their fortieth anniversary.

The boards were white with frost, and the wind pushed a loose piece of the porch screen against its frame.

Out in the frosty pasture beside the house I could see a few of their black cows standing with their tails to the wind. Lyle’s pickup was gone.

I found out later he was out at the far tank breaking ice with a spud bar, the way he does every cold morning.

I went up the steps and knocked. I had the check in my hand already. I did not want to stand there fishing it out of a pocket while she looked at me.

Arlene came to the door in a red cardigan with her short gray hair still damp from the shower.

She opened the door and held the screen door with one hand, and she looked at my face, and she did not say good morning.

“Kendra,” she said. “What’s wrong, honey?”

I held out the check. My hand was not as steady as I wanted it to be.

“Arlene, Cody sold five of your cows at the barn Wednesday,” I said. “He sold them on our old account. The check came to me yesterday, made out in my name.”

She did not take it. She looked at it, and then she looked past me, out at the pasture, and I watched her lips move. She was counting. Forty years of counting cows from that door.