The Six Who Walked Ahead of Me

Milo was twelve and Clayton was eight, brothers, and they came together with one garbage bag of clothes between them.

Ona was ten and could name every cow in the barn by her face.

Abby was six and Lily was four. They were sisters, and Lily had come to me the winter before with a cough that wouldn’t quit and a habit of hiding crackers under her pillow in case there was no supper.

By August she had stopped hiding crackers. That was the best thing I had done all year.

Six is the most my license allowed, and my caseworker, Monica, had to sign off on it twice.

People asked me how I did it. The honest answer is that I didn’t do it alone. Dad did school pickup in his truck. Kayla packed lunches without being asked. And Luke came along.

Luke Granger was thirty-nine, a lineman for the rural electric co-op, and I met him the night an ice storm took our power for three days.

He was up the pole by our machine shed at two in the morning, and I brought him coffee in a thermos.

He told me later that it was terrible coffee and he married me anyway.

He was a good man and a quiet one. He grew up in town, the younger of two boys.

He did not know a heifer from a steer when we started, and by the second spring he was out in the calving pen with me at five in the morning, holding a flashlight and saying, “Is that supposed to be happening?”

He was good with the kids in the way that quiet men sometimes are. He did not make speeches to them.

He fixed Clayton’s bike chain and let Milo ride along on a service call and sat through every one of Ona’s fourth-grade band concerts.

He never once called them my foster kids. He called them the crew.

So when he asked me to marry him, out by the bulk tank of all places, I said yes before he finished the sentence.

And then we started counting money, because a wedding costs what it costs, even in a farmyard.

We wanted it at home. The farmyard by the red barn, the grass mowed short, folding chairs from the church, a tent for supper, a pig roast from a fellow Dad knew, and a dance on the machine shed floor.

We figured it at about fourteen thousand dollars for a hundred and forty people, which is not fancy, but it was more than I had.

I make a fair living, but six kids eat, and the county reimbursement covers what it covers. I had put away about seven thousand.

Luke had his own money tied up in the house we were buying together in town, the one we would move into only after the kids’ placements were worked out with the county.

That was when Marcia offered to pay for half the reception. She did it at Easter dinner, in front of everybody, with her hand on Luke’s shoulder.

“My son is only getting married once,” she said. “I want it done right.” I thanked her, and I meant it.

Seven thousand dollars is a lot of money to anybody I know.