The Grain Cart Seat I Drove for Free

“You did ask,” I said. “I asked you. Three times.”

“You did,” he said. “And I said no three times. I’m not proud of it.”

He picked up the notebook and turned it over in his hands. The back cover was covered in his pencil arithmetic, crossed out and redone.

“I watched you across the road this fall,” he said. “Every day. Running Marcy’s combine like you’d been born in it. And I watched Les drop corn on the ground and get stuck by the drainage ditch, and I lost a week.”

“I’m sorry about the week,” I said, and I was.

“Don’t be,” Lonnie said. “I earned that week. That week was mine.”

Then he looked straight at me, which he had not done since the tractor step.

“Here’s what I want to ask you,” he said. “Would you run my combine next fall? At Marcy’s rate. Twenty-five an hour.”

I didn’t understand that either, at first.

“Your combine,” I said.

“I’m sixty,” he said. “My shoulder’s going and I can’t see as well at night. You’re better in a combine than I am right now. I watched you. And Trent’s better on the trucks and the dryer than either of us.”

“Who runs the cart?” I asked.

He almost smiled. “Whoever I pay,” he said.

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, it just came out of me, and then I was crying, and Mom was crying, and Lonnie was looking at the ceiling the way men do.

Trent hadn’t said a word through any of it. When I wiped my eyes, he was looking right at me.

“Hailey,” he said. “I want to say something.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I always knew it wasn’t fair,” Trent said. “Since I was fourteen. You were better on the cart than me, and you got nothing, and I got paid. Every time Dad handed me a check, I knew you were watching.”

“You never said anything,” I said. Not angry. Just true.

“I know,” he said. His voice broke, and he cleared it. “I asked Dad once, last year. He said it wasn’t my business. And I let it go, because it was easier. That’s on me.”

Lonnie said, “He did ask. I told him no.”

“I should have asked again,” Trent said. “You asked three times. I asked once. I’m sorry.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on his arm, on that same black sweatshirt, which he had washed for Thanksgiving. I could tell because it smelled like Mom’s detergent instead of corn dust.

“Thank you for the cocoa,” I said.

He turned red to his ears. “It was just cocoa,” he said.

“It wasn’t,” I said.

Everybody looked at me. The turkey was getting cold. Nobody cared.

“I need to talk to Marcy first,” I said. “I told her I’d be back next fall. I gave her my word.”

Lonnie nodded slowly. “That’s fair,” he said. “That’s how it ought to be. I’ll talk to her too, if you want.”

“Her corn usually comes off before yours,” I said. “Her ground’s lighter and dries down faster. If she’ll let me finish hers first, I could start yours the next week.”

“We’d lose some days,” Lonnie said.

“You’d lose fewer than you did this year,” I said, and he laughed out loud, the first time I’d heard him laugh since September.

“Then yes,” I said. “If Marcy’s all right with it, yes. I’ll run your combine. At twenty-five.”