The spade
The first hard frost came the second week of October again. I took the Friday off, the same as the year before, and drove out to the farm early with my spading fork in the trunk.
Andy was coming at nine, after he checked a washout on a county road.
When I came up the gravel lane, somebody was already in the bed.
Mom was there on her foam pad at the end of the row, holding the rope with one hand.
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And beside her, standing in the middle of the bed where she had paid a boy to mow it fifteen months before, was Shelly, with a spade in her hands.
Her hands were shaking on the spade handle. Her shoulders were up near her ears, the way they get when she is about to do something hard.
I got out and walked up slowly along the wood chips. Shelly looked up, and her eyes were wet, and she did not look away.
“Kristi,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. I want you to hear this too.”
She turned back to Mom and knelt down in the dirt beside her, right on the bare ground, with the spade laid across her knees. She put her hand on Mom’s arm.
“Arla,” she said. “I need to ask you something, and I need to say something first. I was wrong. Not to be scared. I was wrong to do it the way I did it. I took something from you that wasn’t mine to take, and I did it behind your back, and I’m sorry.”
Mom turned her face toward Shelly’s voice. She did not say anything. She was waiting, the way she waited for a tuber eye under her thumbnail.
Shelly’s voice broke. “My mom fell in her garden in Red Oak. I found her. I never told you that. I never told anybody but Rolf. Every time I came up this lane I thought I was going to find you the same way, and I couldn’t breathe.”
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, very soft.
“That doesn’t make it right,” Shelly said. “I know it doesn’t. I saw you at the fair. I saw you laugh. I haven’t heard you laugh like that since before your eyes went, and I’m the reason you couldn’t, for a whole year.”
She took a big breath and wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and left a streak of dirt across her cheek.
“So here’s what I want to ask you. Will you teach me how to dig them? And how to store them? So I can help. So you’re never out here by yourself.”
Mom sat very still on her foam pad. Then she put her hand out and found Shelly’s face, and felt the wet on it, and the dirt, and she left her hand there on Shelly’s cheek for a long moment.
“Dig wide,” Mom said. “Twelve inches out from the stalk all the way around. The tubers run farther than you think. And go easy when you lift. The necks break if you pry.”
Shelly let out a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. Then she stood up and put the spade in the ground twelve inches out from the stalk.