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

Three Weeks

People who hear this always ask the same thing. Why didn’t you just tell your dad that night? Why didn’t you call somebody? The sheriff, the pastor, Wade’s brother in Axtell, anybody?

I thought about every one of them. But it was not a crime. Wade had not touched me. He had not said one dirty word.

He had asked a girl to supper and said he might tell her father something, and the something was true.

If I called the sheriff, what would I even say? That a man was threatening to tell the truth?

And the truth was the whole problem. The only thing Wade had on me was a secret, and the only thing that kills a secret is telling it yourself, first.

I knew that. I knew it the whole three weeks. I just could not make my mouth do it, because telling Dad meant telling him I was leaving.

So I stalled. I am not proud of it. Every morning at 6:40 Wade came in and said, “Thought about it?” and every morning I said I was still thinking.

I said I was busy with harvest. I said maybe after the first of the month. I said whatever would get him out the door for one more day.

He started coming by the house. Not inside. He would pull up at the end of the lane in the evening and sit there with his engine running, and Dad would look out the window and say, “Wonder what Wade wants,” and go out and talk to him about the hay, and I would stand at the kitchen sink and not breathe.

Saturdays were the worst. Dad went to the co-op every Saturday at seven for coffee with the other men, and every Saturday I watched him drive away and counted the minutes until he came back.

Every Saturday he came home and said nothing, and I knew Wade had sat across from him at that long table and said nothing too. Yet.

Megan called on a Tuesday night and asked what was wrong, because she said I sounded like somebody had died.

I almost told her. I did not. I said work was busy. She said, “Katie, you sound like you did that whole last winter,” and I had to get off the phone before she heard me cry.

On the third Saturday, Wade stopped me in the parking lot of the coffee shop before I could get my apron on.

He leaned on the door of my car and said, “I’m about done waiting. I’ll see your dad at the co-op next week. You let me know before then.”

He tapped the roof of my car twice, like you would tap a cow on the hip to move her along, and he walked off.