Where Sherri Was
I should be fair about Sherri, because I promised myself when I started telling this that I would tell all of it, not only the parts that make me look good.
She did not run off. She stood at the edge of the beans for the first fifteen minutes with her coffee, watching.
Then, when the Pruitt girls came up the ditch with Biscuit, she set the cup down on a fence post and went and held a panel.
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She did not say anything to anybody. She held that panel square and steady, she latched the pen behind Biscuit, and she dropped the pin.
I saw her look down at that pin for a long second after she dropped it.
When all three pigs were back in and watered down, Blaine walked over to her. I was standing close enough to hear every word.
“You’re not coming to the barn this week,” he said. His voice was even, the way it gets when he is fixing something that is already broken.
“Blaine,” she said. Just his name, the way I had said hers an hour before.
“I mean it, Sherri. Not to the wash racks, not to the show ring, not to the pens. Calvin shows his pigs without you there this year.”
She opened her mouth. Then she looked past him at the eleven, then fifteen, then nearly twenty people standing in the lane with their pant legs soaked, and she shut it again.
“All right,” she said. That was all she said, and she said it quietly.
She picked her coffee cup off the fence post and walked back up the road toward the home place.
Her house is a quarter mile north of ours, the same farmhouse she and Blaine grew up in. Their dad Clark lives with her now since their mother passed.
Nobody said anything about her after she left. That is how our road is. Trisha Hoffman just said, “Well, those pigs aren’t going to load themselves,” and everybody turned around and got to work.