The Truck Keys in the Hayfield

Then he said, “Thanksgiving’s at Mom’s at one. She wants to know if you’re bringing the chess pie.” And he turned around and walked back to his car and drove away.

Dustin drove the black truck home that night.

I walked out to the road behind him and watched his taillights go all the way down the gravel to the highway and turn toward town.

Dustin found the dog tag the next morning.

He called me at six thirty, before his shift. He did not say hello. He just said, “April,” and then nothing for a long time, and I could hear the truck idling in the tire shop lot.

“I wasn’t sure if I should,” I said.

“You should have,” he said. His voice was rough. “You should have.”

When I saw the truck that weekend, he had hung the tag from the rearview mirror on a length of ball chain. It swung a little every time he took a corner.

He said he talked to it sometimes on the drive in. He said he told Jake about some girl, and he could hear Jake saying he was not ready for that girl.

The fall went by. I went back to the three-year-olds full time. We sold every bale of that last cutting to the Webbs down the road, who run forty head of mama cows and pay cash.

I put the money toward the barn end, which was the first line on Jake’s list.

Dustin came out most Saturdays anyway. There was not much to do in the field in October and November, but he found things. He fixed the barn door track. He split some locust for the woodstove. He brought me a coonhound puppy a fellow at the tire shop was giving away and said, “Second line on the list. A dog that listens.”

“That dog is never going to listen,” I said.

“Jake didn’t say it had to listen to you,” Dustin said.

Thanksgiving was at Ray and Nancy’s place near Woodlawn, the way it had been every year since Jake and I married. I almost did not go.

I sat in my old Impala at the end of their lane for ten minutes with a chess pie on the seat next to me before I made myself drive up.

Ray had the burn barrel going in the side yard, and a few of the men were standing out there around it with their hands in their jacket pockets, the way men do at a family dinner when the house is too crowded.

It was cold and gray and smelled like woodsmoke.

Shane was out there with his dad.

He had on a canvas coat, not a polo, and he nodded at me when I got out of the car. I nodded back. Neither of us moved.

Then Dustin came up the lane in the black truck.

He pulled in slow across the yard, the way you drive on somebody else’s grass, and parked it right beside the burn barrel. Everybody turned to look. Ray let out a low whistle. One of the cousins said, “Dusty, who’d you rob?”

Dustin got out. He did not say anything about where the truck came from. He just said, “Hey, Dad,” and hugged his father, and then went around the back to get the green bean casserole Nancy had made him promise to carry in.

Shane walked over to the truck.

He stood at the driver’s door and looked in through the window, and I knew the second he saw the dog tag on the mirror, because his whole body went still.