The lot behind Troy’s barn was empty. I noticed it before I even shut off the engine, because for three months nine black cows had stood along that fence every evening, waiting on hay.
It was the second week of October, the drought year.
I had just come off a twelve-hour shift in the ER in Ainsworth, and I had stopped on my way home to bring my sister-in-law back her casserole dish.
The grass in Troy’s yard had gone the color of a paper sack. The wind was out of the west, and it carried dust off the road and rattled the loose tin on the shed.
And there, parked on a trailer in the middle of the front yard where the swing set used to be, was a bass boat.
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It was long and shiny, the kind with the big motor tilted up on the back and two seats up high for fishing.
I stood there holding the dish. I remember thinking it must belong to a friend of his. I remember thinking a lot of things before I let myself think the true one.
Troy came out of the shop wiping his hands on a rag. He was thirty-five, six years older than me, with the same wide shoulders as my husband and the same way of squinting into the wind.
“Hey, Whit,” he said. “Megan’s in town with the boys. You can just set that on the step.”
I set the dish on the step. Then I walked to the fence behind the barn and looked at the empty lot, the trampled ground, the hay feeder with nothing in it.
“Troy,” I said. “Where are Kyle’s cows?”
He didn’t answer right away. He folded the rag over twice and put it in his back pocket. That was how I knew, before he said a word.
“Hay’s short,” he said. “You know it is. I put up half what I did last year. I had seventeen head to get through a winter on half a stack, and I did the math every way there is.”
“Where are they, Troy?”
“I ran them through the sale barn Thursday.” He said it fast, like pulling a splinter. “The fall market was soft. They brought a little over sixteen thousand, and after commission it was right around sixteen.”
I looked at him. I looked at the boat. I did not have to ask, but I asked anyway, because I wanted to hear him say it out loud.
“Where’s the money?”
He looked at the boat too. Then he looked at the ground. “I’m holding it for the soldier,” he said. “That’s how I think of it. It’s for when he’s home.”
“It’s a boat, Troy.”
“It’s a boat for him and me.” His voice came up a little. “We’ve talked about it since we were kids. Merritt Reservoir, every weekend, him and me. I found a good used one out of Grand Island and the guy wanted it gone. I put it down. I’ll square it with Kyle when he’s back.”
I want to be honest about this part. I did not say anything clever. I did not say anything at all for a while. The wind blew my braid across my face and I let it.
Kyle was in Kuwait. He had left with his Nebraska Army National Guard unit at the end of June, and he had five more months to go before his plane touched down in Lincoln.