She had driven ninety miles. She was wearing her good jeans and a clean shirt, and she had a paper sack from the Hy-Vee in one hand and an envelope in the other. She looked like she had not slept in a week.
“Can I come in?” she asked. Her voice was very small, smaller than mine ever was with her.
I did not know what to say, so I looked at Toby. He was awake, gray in the face, Edsel’s hat on the tray table beside him.
“Hi, Aunt Shawna,” he said. “You can come in.”
She came in and stood at the foot of the bed. She put the paper sack down on the chair.
It was full of the root beer barrel candies he liked when he was little, the ones our grandmother used to keep in a dish by the door.
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“I brought you these,” she said. “I didn’t know if you could eat them.”
“Not this week,” Toby said. “But I can save them.” He smiled at her, and I watched her face break.
She held out the envelope, not to me, to him. “This is five thousand dollars, Toby,” she said.
“That’s what’s left. I paid the hay man with the rest. I’ll pay you the other forty-four hundred when the calves sell in October. I promise you.”
Toby did not take the envelope. He looked at it for a long time. Then he said, “Aunt Shawna, did the hay man really come?”
She nodded. “He came. Your cousins’ cows are going to eat this winter.”
“Then that part was for the cows,” Toby said. “Rooster ate your grass. That’s fair.”
Shawna sat down on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands.
She cried like I had not seen her cry since our father died, when she was nineteen and I was fifteen and she was the one who called the funeral home because Mother could not.
I got up and went around the bed and sat beside her. I put my arm around her.
She leaned into me, my big sister, the one who could back a trailer and pull a calf, and she said, “I’m sorry, Sonja. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking about your cows,” I said. “And about Lonnie. I know.”
“I was thinking that I was the one who had nothing,” she said into my shoulder. “And I was wrong. Look at him. I was so wrong.”
Toby reached out from the bed and patted her back, the way Edsel had patted him. She laughed through it, a wet, broken laugh, and she took his hand and held it against her cheek.
In the end Toby took the envelope, but he made her a deal.
He said she could keep the October money, all of it, if she would let his heifer live in her bottom pasture next year, and if she would help him fill out the entry, in his own name this time.
“In your name,” Shawna said. “I’ll drive it to the extension office myself.”
She stayed until visiting hours were over. She sat in my chair and I sat on the windowsill, and the three of us watched a ball game on the little television with the sound off, and for a couple of hours it was just the way it used to be.