The Seat I Gave Miss Ada

But it came out wrong. Not angry. More like a child who has scraped a knee and has not decided yet whether to cry about it.

“No,” I said. “You made the picture you wanted.”

She did not answer that.

“Carl’s mother is going to go home and tell everybody in Sioux Falls that she rode out with the oldest woman in the township,” I said. “And the woman drove the team herself. That is a better picture than two strangers on a bench.”

Megan looked at the ground. She has a way of chewing the inside of her cheek when she is caught being wrong. She has done it since she was four.

“She has ridden the first ride for forty years,” I said. “It costs us nothing. It is the one free thing we give out here, and it is the best thing we give.”

“I know what it is,” she said, quiet.

“Then do not take it from her,” I said. “Not to give a bench to somebody who will forget this farm by Thanksgiving.”

Megan was quiet a long moment. The team stamped behind us and a horse blew and somewhere a child was shrieking happy over the size of a pumpkin.

“Mom used to hold that seat for her,” Megan said finally. “I forgot that. I do not know how I forgot that.”

“You were busy counting,” I said. I did not say it mean. It was just the truth, and she took it like the truth.

“She looked so happy up there,” Megan said. “I did that to her. I almost did the other thing instead, and it would have been just as easy.”

“It is always just as easy,” I said. “That is the whole trouble with it.”

The Photographs

Here is the part Megan did the math on later. Because she is who she is, and because this time the math came out on Ada’s side.

A woman from the birthday party had a good camera. The kind with the long lens. She took pictures of the whole ride.

She emailed them to Megan that night, because Megan was the one who had taken the deposit for the party.

Megan called me at nine o’clock. I braced for a fight. I actually sat down on the stairs for it.

“There are forty of them,” she said. “Forty pictures, Gwen. Ada is in every single one.”

She was. Up front in her brown coat. Pointing her cane at the stump.

The reins in her two hands at the gate, her chin up like a girl’s.

In the one the kids liked best, she has her head thrown back laughing, and the whole field of pumpkins stands behind her like the farm itself had thrown her a party.