He stood there and looked at my cows for a long time. At Number 14. At Pepper. At the calves lying down in the sun.
Then he looked at me.
“Vera,” he said.
Dad didn’t move. He stayed right where he was, beside me, with his hands in his barn coat.
He didn’t step in front of me and he didn’t step away. He just stood there like a fence post himself.
“I saw you,” I said. “Behind the barn. I went for her show stick.”
Darwin closed his eyes.
“I didn’t say anything because she was going in the ring,” I said. “And I’m not going to say anything to her now, either. That’s yours to do, if you’re going to do it. But I’m not coming back.”
He opened his eyes. They were wet. I had seen Darwin cry twice in fifteen years, once when Winnie was born and once at his dad’s funeral.
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“I know,” he said.
“These are mine. You know they’re mine.”
“I know they’re yours,” he said. “I always knew. Dad knew. Everybody knew.” He held out the papers. “You don’t have to leave these with me. I’m not going to fight you on the cows.”
I didn’t take them. “Keep them till the lawyer asks,” I said. “I want you to have read them.”
He looked down at the papers and nodded. Then he looked over at Dad.
“Ellis,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Dad looked at him for a long time. Then he said the most he had said all morning.
“You ought to be,” Dad said. “You had a good woman and a good girl. You still have a good girl. Don’t lose both.”
Darwin nodded. He didn’t argue. He didn’t say anything about how hard the spring had been, or his dad, or the bank. I think he knew that none of it was an answer.
“Can I tell Winnie?” he said. “Myself. Before she hears it.”
“You’d better,” I said. “Today. Before the sale. And you don’t make me the reason.”
“I won’t.”
“And you don’t make Amanda a villain to her, either. Winnie’s going to see her boys in school. That’s not on them.”
He looked at me a little strange then, like he hadn’t expected that. “All right,” he said.
He walked back to his truck and got in. He sat for a minute with his hands on the wheel.
Then he backed out slowly and drove away, and the dust hung in the lane behind him in the early sun.
Dad picked up his coffee again. “That was decent of you,” he said. “About her boys.”
“It’s true, though.”
“Truth’s not always decent,” he said. “That was both.”