The Five Dollar Bill at the Co-op

“All right,” he said. His voice came out rough. “Show me.”

Owen turned around and walked to the corner of the scale pad and pointed. Dale followed him. He had to step off the side of the scale and around the guard rail, and that put him standing on my slab, boots on the concrete, with his own corn sitting in his own truck six feet away.

“That’s me,” Owen said. “O.K. Luis let me. In July.”

Dale looked down at it. He didn’t say anything. Then he did something I’ve never seen him do in twelve years. He got down on one knee on the concrete, slow, the way a man his age does it, one hand on his thigh.

He looked at those two letters for a long time. Long enough that the driver in the next truck looked away. He put his thumb in the O and moved it around the curve, the way Owen had.

“Huh,” was all he said.

Randy came over then. I don’t think Randy meant anything by it. I’ve thought about it since and I really don’t. He was just making conversation, the way you do at the scale in harvest.

“Dale,” he said. “Didn’t figure you’d be using the floor. You were the one at the annual meeting stood up and said we’d be paying a fortune to build ourselves a parking lot.”

Jeff had come out of the scale house behind him, and Jeff laughed. Not unkind. Just a neighbor’s laugh. A couple of men by the next truck grinned into their coffee.

Dale stayed on his knee. He didn’t get mad. He didn’t make a joke. He looked up at Randy, and then at the north bunker with its hill of gold corn in the sun, and then back down at the slab.

“I did say that,” he said. “I said it in front of eighty people. I was wrong.”

He said it loud enough for Jeff and the man in the next truck and Randy to hear it. He said it to all of them. Then he looked at Owen, crouched beside him.

“I was wrong about a few things,” he said, quieter. “Wasn’t I, bud.”

Owen didn’t answer. He’s ten. He just put his hand on his grandpa’s shoulder, on the canvas, the way you’d steady somebody getting up. And Dale took that help. He put his hand over Owen’s and used it, and got up off the concrete, and his knee cracked like Randy’s had.

The man at the pit was waving for the red truck to come on. The line was waiting. Dale nodded to him and turned back to his cab, and then he stopped and looked at me.

Not at Owen. At me.

“Ben,” he said. “Would it be all right if the boy rode back to the field with me? After I dump.”

I knew what that cost him. A man like Dale doesn’t ask. He tells. He has told me where to park, how to stack wood, what to think about the price of corn for twelve years. He had never once asked me for my son.

“Ask Owen,” I said.

Dale looked at me a second longer. Then he nodded, like I’d said something fair, and turned to his grandson.

“You want to ride along, bud? Truck’s empty on the way back. Then we’ll see about the combine.”

Owen looked at me. I didn’t nod. I didn’t do anything. I wanted him to know it was his.

“Can Dad come?” he said.