The Plate I Set for the Man Who Rents Dad’s Hay

The fourth plate went down on the table at five minutes to noon, and my hands were shaking so badly that it rattled against the wood before it settled.

I straightened the fork beside it twice. Then I went back to the stove, because I did not trust myself to stand still.

The pot roast had been in the white enamel roaster since church let out. Carrots, potatoes, a whole onion cut in quarters, the way Mom made it every Sunday of my life until the Sunday she could not get out of bed anymore.

Four years later I still made it exactly her way, because Dad never once asked for anything different.

Dad was in the front room with the farm paper, still in his good blue plaid shirt from church, pressed the night before on the board in the laundry room.

He had looked at the fourth plate when he walked through the kitchen. He had not asked about it. That was Dad. He figured a person would tell him when she was ready.

I was not ready. I had not been ready for three weeks. But Wade Kessler’s pickup was already turning in off the county road, and the dog was barking, and there was no more time to get ready in.

The Man at the Counter

I need to go back and tell you about Wade, because he was not a bad man, not in the way people mean when they say it.

For most of my life he was just Wade, the man who farmed the section north of us and rented Dad’s eighty acres of hay ground on a handshake.

He had rented it for nine years at four thousand dollars a year. He paid Dad in two checks, one in May and one after the last cutting, and he never once paid late.

When Mom was sick, Wade baled that field without being asked and put up the bales in our yard so Dad would have hay for the cows without lifting a finger.

I work at the coffee shop on Main Street in Holdrege, the one with the bell over the door and the cinnamon rolls that Donna, the owner, makes from scratch at four in the morning.

I open five days a week. I have worked there since I was seventeen, and I know every regular by his order before he gets the door shut behind him.

Wade came in at 6:40 every morning. Black coffee, one cinnamon roll, the corner stool by the window where he could see his pickup.

He paid with a five and left a one dollar tip folded in quarters, a tight little square of a bill, tucked under the edge of his saucer.

He had done it that way for as long as I had worked there.

For years he talked about wheat prices and the Huskers and whether it was going to rain. He asked about Dad.

He asked about Megan, my sister, who works as a dental assistant in Grand Island. He was polite in the way older farmers are polite, kind of shy, never looking you straight in the eye for long.

Then in the spring his wife left him. Everybody in town knew within a week, because that is how it goes when there are four thousand people and two grocery stores.

She moved to Lincoln to be near her sister. She took the good furniture and the dog. Wade kept the farm and the empty house and the quiet.

He kept coming in at 6:40, but he stopped talking about wheat. He started staying longer. He would sit there through a second cup and a third, watching me wipe the counter and fill the creamers, and if I went into the back he would still be there when I came out.

I felt sorry for him. I want to say that plainly, because it matters to the rest of this. I was kind to him because he was sad, and because Mom raised me to be kind to sad people, and because I knew a little something myself about a house that has gone too quiet.