The Thing With No Paper
Sharla walked across the road about four o’clock.
I saw her coming and my stomach pulled tight. I made myself keep waving cars, because I was not going to have it out with her in front of the FFA kids and the families.
She stood off to the side by the pumpkin wagon a long while. Just watching.
Watching the families come out of my corn laughing. Watching Grandpa at the gate making change and talking. Watching the thing our father made walk around alive on new ground.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
When the last of a group had gone in, I went over to her.
I did not gloat. There was nothing in me that wanted to. I was too tired, and she looked too small standing there by the pumpkins.
“Yours is the better maze,” I told her. And I meant it. “Eight foot walls. A real one. Mine you can see clean over half of it.”
“Then why are they all over here,” she said.
Her voice broke on it. And I understood she was not angry. She was something a good deal worse than angry.
“Because a maze is not the books, Sharla,” I said. As gentle as I had it in me to say it.
“I kept them good.”
“You kept them good. You did. But you told yourself the part you could count was the whole thing. And it never was the whole thing.”
She looked at the corn a long time. The low sun was in it, and the last families were coming out of the center with straw on their coats.
“I don’t know how to cut one,” she said finally. Small. “I never did. Not one path of it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I used to stand at that gate and tell people I designed it,” she said. “And then I would drive home and I would actually believe that I had. Isn’t that something. I believed my own self.”
I did not answer that right off. The next thing out of my mouth was going to matter, and I knew it.
So I stood there in the cold by the pumpkin wagon with my sister. I thought about my mother and my aunt and the eleven years of quiet I had buried my mother under.
I thought about what my father would have wanted, standing here in his first field.
I took a breath.