The Pontoon Key on a Sparkler

Bill

Bill Gruber sells farm equipment at a dealership up in Versailles. Tractors, balers, hay rakes, the big zero-turn mowers. He is fifty-four and he is good at it, because farmers trust him.

He is a good man. I want that on the record before the rest. He is a good man who did a foolish thing because he was ashamed, and shame will make a good man do almost anything.

His divorce from Paige’s mother was ugly and it was long. When it was over, Kim had the house in Eldon and most of the retirement, and Bill had his truck, his tools, and a payment plan with a lawyer.

Kim moved to Tulsa with her second husband when Paige was seventeen. Paige stayed with her daddy to finish school. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment over a hardware store, and Bill slept on the couch so she could have a real room.

I met him at the bank. He came to my window every other Friday to deposit his check, and every other Friday he asked how my day was going and actually waited for the answer.

We married eight years ago. Paige was eighteen and headed to Missouri State in Springfield. She stood up with us at the courthouse in a yellow dress and cried harder than either one of us.

Logan’s family, the Teagues, farm about six hundred acres east of Eldon. Corn, beans, a cow-calf herd. They have a new machine shed and a grandmother who still cans two hundred quarts of green beans a summer.

They are nice people. They are not show-offs. But Logan’s father had already told Paige they could have a building lot off the home place when they were ready, and Lisa had given her the family quilt at the engagement supper.

I saw Bill’s face when Lisa told that story about the quilt, back in May. He smiled and nodded, and then he went out to the truck for something and stayed out there twenty minutes.

He had nothing to put next to that. That is the whole truth of it. A man who spent his life fixing things for other people had nothing of his own to hand his only child.

So he stood up at the grill with forty people watching and he handed her mine. I think he told himself I would go along with it rather than make a scene. I think he told himself we would sort it out later, in private.

He was half right. I did not make a scene. But I was not going to go along with it either.