The Singer That Came Back Home

He’d stopped at the table where the Singer sat and stood there a long time, and he’d asked Connie to hold the Singer while he looked at the rest.

I wrote his name on the back of Grandma’s note card. Then I hung the clipboard back on the gate and went to help Connie fold the last table.

Neither of us talked about the Singer, and she didn’t ask what I’d been reading.

That night I looked him up in the phone book, the thin one from the county that still comes every year.

There was one Haugen in Herman with a rural route address, about twenty miles south of us on the county road.

I told Nate I was going to go see the man. He was eating cold hotdish at the counter at eleven at night with grain dust still in his eyebrows.

“You want me to come?” he said.

“You’ll be in the field.”

“I’ll be in the field,” he agreed. “Take the good car, not the Pontiac. And bring cash, not a check. Old farmers like cash on the table.” He was right about that, too.

I went Monday after my last client, a sweet old man in Hoffman who likes his eggs scrambled hard and his radio on the farm report.

I stopped at the bank first and took out four hundred dollars, which was most of what we had in savings until settlement.

I had decided that number in the car on the way to the bank. I didn’t want to go out there and haggle with an old man over my grandmother.

I wanted to make it so easy for him to say yes that he wouldn’t feel like he lost anything.

Merle Haugen’s place sat back off the gravel with a row of box elders on the north side and a machine shed bigger than the house.

Merle came out wiping his hands on a shop rag.

He was seventy, he told me later, retired from farming since 2015, when he sold his cows and rented the cropland to the neighbor. He knew me before I said a word.

“You’re the granddaughter,” he said. “You were standing at that table with a card.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Abby Thorson. Edna was my grandma.”

“I knew Edna a little. Bought eggs from her years ago when my wife was laid up.” He held the door open. “Come in. I just made coffee, and it’s bad, but it’s hot.”

His kitchen was clean and plain, with a calendar from the co-op on the wall and an oilcloth on the table.

On a card table by the window, under a work lamp, sat Grandma’s Singer with the back cover off and the motor showing.

“I’ve been into her already,” he said, a little sheepish. “The cord was cracked bad, both leads. That’s how a fire starts in these old ones. I put a new cord and a new belt on her yesterday, and oiled everything that moves.”

I stood looking at that machine with the work lamp on it, and I couldn’t talk for a second. He saw that and went to pour the coffee and gave me the minute.

“Tell me why you want it,” he said when he sat down. “I’ll listen. I won’t promise anything, but I’ll listen.”

I took out the note card and set it on his oilcloth.

He put on his reading glasses and read it, and then he read it again, and then he turned it over and saw his own name on the back in my handwriting.