The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Barn

The real reason I could say out loud was the barn.

On a Thursday in March of 2024, Orris went down in the milk house with his hand on his chest and a hose running. I found him on the concrete. He had a quadruple bypass at Cox South in Springfield, eight days in the hospital and a long road after, and I slept in a vinyl recliner by his bed. Berniece drove up three times that first week with a casserole and a clean nightgown for me, and one night she slept in the waiting room chair in her church shoes, so I could shower.

The hospital bills came in April. After insurance, we owed $5,100. The feed store note had gone past due while I was in Springfield, and that came to $3,900. Nine thousand dollars, in round numbers, on a dairy where the milk check had been falling for two years and the man who ran the barn could not lift a bucket.

In November we sold the herd. All sixty-two. I stood at the fence line as the trucks from Lawrence County loaded them one at a time. I had named half of them. A man I had known thirty years paid us under what they were worth, because he knew we had to sell. Orris sat on the porch swing, and he did not come down.

I cleaned houses on Tuesdays and Fridays. I sold eggs. I kept a shoebox on the kitchen table with the letters in it, and every night I took them out and put them back in a different order, as if there were an order that made the number smaller.

I never told Berniece. This is the part I cannot get around. She would have loaned it, probably before I finished the sentence, and she would never have mentioned it again. I knew that, and it was why I could not ask. A woman who has been second at everything does not borrow from the one who is always first. I would sooner have lost the farm.