The Truck Keys in the Hayfield

I had kept it on my nightstand for two months and slept with it under my pillow more nights than I would admit to anybody.

I sat in the cab of the black truck in our barn and held that tag a long time.

Then I opened the center console and laid it in there, on top of the title, and closed the lid. I did not put a note with it. Dustin would know.

The last cutting was the third Saturday in September.

It was the kind of golden afternoon you only get in middle Tennessee at the end of summer, when the light comes in low and everything looks like it has been dipped in honey.

Round bales were scattered all over the field where we had dropped them that morning.

I wore my gray Army T-shirt, one of Jake’s, the letters across the front half worn off, washed so many times it had gone soft as a dish towel.

I had my hair pulled back in a low ponytail and my work gloves on. I drove the black truck out the field road and parked it behind me in the stubble. The black paint was dull with field dust.

Dustin was finishing the last row.

He shut the baler down and climbed off the tractor and walked toward me with hay all over his white T-shirt and his neck sunburned red under that faded green ball cap he has worn since high school.

He stopped about ten feet away and looked at the truck. “Whose truck?”

I held out the keys in my gloved hand.

“Yours,” I said.

He did not reach for them. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. “April, no. That’s Jake’s money. You need that money.”

“I’ve got the land note covered and a job I love,” I said. “It’s Jake’s truck. Look in the notebook if you don’t believe me. Last line on the inside cover.”

I took the green notebook out of my back pocket and handed it to him. He opened it to the inside cover. I watched his lips move as he read it. Black truck. Used. Paid for.

“He’d want it driven,” I said. “By the brother who stayed.”

Dustin closed the notebook and looked at the ground. His jaw was working. And it was right then, over his shoulder, that I saw the silver sedan.

It was parked in the stubble behind Dustin, not thirty feet away. I had not heard it come up the field road.

Shane was standing beside it in a blue polo shirt, short dark hair, hands at his sides. He was not doing anything. He was calm. He was just watching.

Dustin turned and saw him too. He looked at Shane a long time, and then he looked back at me.

“Take them, Dusty,” I said.

Slowly, like they might be hot, he reached out and took the keys out of my hand.

Shane pushed off the side of his car and started toward us.

He did not step high over the rows this time. He walked straight through the stubble in his good shoes.

He stopped a few steps behind Dustin.

He looked at the black truck a long time. He looked at Dustin holding the keys. Then he looked at me.

He opened his mouth. I braced for it.

“You get it from Pruitt over in Adams?” he said finally.

“Yes.”

“That’s a good truck. He changed the oil every three thousand miles. Everybody at the lot knew that truck.” He swallowed. “Jake would have liked it.”