The Maze I Cut Across the Road

What The Books Told Her

I did not call her that day. I wanted to, and I knew better.

A thing said hot is a thing you cannot take back. I had watched my own mother and my aunt not speak for eleven years over a thing said hot across a Thanksgiving table, and I buried my mother with that quiet still sitting between them.

So I slept on it. Which is to say I lay in the dark next to Jeff and did not sleep one minute.

In the morning I drove to the home place to talk to Sharla face to face. She kept an office in the old milk house, a desk and a filing cabinet and a space heater, and she was in there with the ledger open when I came in.

“You heard it,” she said, before I got a word out. She did not even look up from the column she was adding.

“I heard it.”

“Dana, I run this business.” She said it tired. Like she was explaining something to a slow child. “I keep every number. I file the sales tax. I carry the insurance. I know to the penny what this place takes in and what it costs to run.”

“I design the maze, Sharla. I draw it. I cut it. People come for the maze.”

“People come because it is open,” she said. “And it is open because I keep the lights on and the money straight. A maze is just corn, Dana. Anybody can mow corn.”

“Anybody did not mow it. I did.”

“Not anybody can run a business.” She set her pencil down. “That is the hard part. That is the part nobody sees, and that is the part that is mine.”

I stood there in that cold little milk house, and I understood something I had not understood before.

She believed it. She was not lying on the radio.

In her own head it was true. She had sat at that desk six years with the numbers in front of her, and the numbers had her name on them. Somewhere along the way she had decided the part you could count was the whole thing.

“Dad started this maze,” I said.

“And Dad is gone,” she said. “And I am the one who kept it from going under the first spring after, when you wanted to quit. You remember that? You wanted to quit.”

I did remember. The spring after we buried him I had not wanted to cut anything.

“You can keep cutting if you want,” Sharla said. “I will pay you for your time. Fair wage. Same as the FFA kids get.”

“Pay me.”

“For your time. Yes.”

“Like the kids.”

“Dana, I would rather you heard it from me than argued about it in front of people. This is my operation now. I need you to understand that.”

Pay me. Like the kids. For my time.

I did not scream. I want that on the record.

My father used to say the loudest thing in any room is a quiet person who has made up their mind. I made up my mind right there in that milk house, and I did not raise my voice one notch to do it.

“All right,” I said.

And I walked out.