The Seat on the Branson Bus

Jake

My husband was in the corral when we got home, sorting calves. Jake is thirty-six.

He runs cows and puts up hay on the ground his dad farmed, and in October he is outside from dark to dark.

Jake doesn’t talk much, but he notices things. He took one look at me getting Kaylee out of the car and walked over and leaned on the fence with his gloves still on. “What happened,” he said.

I told him all of it. The birthday cake, the Dollar General, the text, his mother at the door.

I kept my voice low because Kaylee was on the swing set twenty feet away, and she hears everything.

He took his gloves off one finger at a time, which is what he does when he’s mad and doesn’t want to be.

“I’ll call Cheryl tonight,” he said. “This is foolishness. She knows you work. Everybody in town knows you work.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t call her.”

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Mandy, she told Mom you think you’re too good for them. That’s a lie. You want me to let a lie sit there?”

I tried to say it right. I said, “If you call her, it turns into you and your sisters. It turns into Thanksgiving and Christmas and every Sunday dinner for the next ten years. You don’t fight your husband’s sisters over a bus seat, Jake.”

“Then what do you want to do,” he said. “Just pay it?”

I thought about that. It was $160. That’s a lot of money in our house; it’s a week of groceries and some of the light bill.

But it was money I could earn back, and it wasn’t worth losing my husband’s family over.

“Maybe,” I said. “If I pay it, at least nobody can say I backed out on them. I’ll figure out what to do with the seat. Let me think about it one night.”

He put his gloves back on. “Whatever you decide, I’m with you,” he said. “But if they keep on, I’m going to say something. I’m not going to let them talk about my wife.”

That’s Jake. He will wait for you, but he won’t wait forever, and he won’t pretend he doesn’t see what he sees.