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

Monday Morning

I went to work Monday at five like always. I did not know what was going to happen at 6:40.

I did not know if Wade would come in, or what I would say if he did. I told Donna the whole thing while we were setting out the cinnamon rolls, and she did not say much, but she moved the register so I could stand behind it with the counter between me and the corner stool.

Wade did not come in. Not Monday, not Tuesday, not for the rest of that week. The corner stool sat empty at 6:40 every morning, and every morning I looked at it, and every morning I felt something I could not name.

Not glad. Just sorry, I think. Sorry that it had to go that way.

I never told anybody in town what happened at that table. Neither did Dad. But it is a small town, and Dad renting his hay ground to somebody new after nine years with Wade did not go unnoticed, and people can do their own arithmetic.

What surprised me was what people did instead of talking. On Wednesday old Jeff Harms, who sits at the co-op table with Dad every Saturday, came in for coffee, which he had never done in his life.

He paid with a twenty and told me to keep the change, and he said, “Heard you’re going to be a nurse. Good. We need one around here who knows what a calving jack is.”

On Thursday the ladies from the church quilting circle came in, all six of them, at ten in the morning, and ordered six coffees and one cinnamon roll to split.

When they left there was an envelope under the cinnamon roll plate with a card in it that said For Katie’s books, and sixty dollars, ten from each of them.

On Friday Donna told me she was hiring her niece to open on weekdays starting in January, so I could keep Saturdays and Sundays and still have a job.

She said she had been meaning to hire somebody anyway. That was not true, and we both knew it, and neither of us said so.

Saturday at the Co-op

That Saturday Dad went to the co-op at seven, the same as every Saturday for thirty years. I did not count the minutes this time.

I made coffee and sat at the table and read my nursing program handbook, all the way through the part about clinical uniforms.

He came home at nine and set a paper sack on the counter. Inside was a stethoscope in a box.

Not a fancy one. The kind they sell at the farm store for checking calves, gray rubber and a silver head, with the price sticker still on it. Twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents.

“Jeff says that’s the wrong kind,” Dad said. “Jeff says they’ll make you get a proper one. But I figured you ought to have one to practice on.”

He went out to check the cows before I could say anything, which is what Dad does when he does not want anybody looking at his face.

I still have it. It is in my bag right now. The instructors laughed when I showed it to them, and then one of them, an older woman who grew up on a farm outside Minden, picked it up and turned it over in her hands and did not laugh at all.

She said, “Your dad bought you this?” and I said yes, and she gave it back to me very gently.