The Uncle Who Pulled the Hitch Pin

In the yard

Tiffany Becker, Gavin’s mom, grabbed him up so hard his cap fell off.

“Who leaves children in a field?” she said. Not to me. Not to anyone. Just out loud, into the dark.

I didn’t have an answer that would have helped anybody.

Merritt came across the yard from his pickup fast. He had a little corn dust still on his face. He looked at me, then at the kids, then counted them himself. I watched his lips move.

“Everybody’s here,” I said.

“What happened?”

“Your uncle came across the fence line, pulled the pin and took your dad’s tractor home.”

Merritt stood very still. He is a quiet man. He farms with his hands and talks with them too, and right then both of his hands were in fists at his sides.

“He what?”

“He said nobody asked him.”

Merritt looked east, toward Myles’s yard. You could see his yard light from ours, a mile off across the section. Merritt took one step that way.

I put my hand on his arm. “Not tonight,” I said. “Not with the kids here. They’ve had enough tonight.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded, and he went and threw another chunk of ash on the fire, and he started making hot dogs like nothing had happened.

That is what I married. A man who will go after a thing, but not at the wrong time and not in front of children.

We did the rest of the evening right there in the yard. Hot dogs and cider and Tiffany’s kuchen, which she had baked that morning, peach, the kind her grandma made.

The kids were fine. Kids usually are, if the grown-ups are. By the second hot dog Noel was telling everybody it was the best hayride ever because we got to walk in the dark.

Gavin sat on the tailgate of Merritt’s pickup with Ava and ate two pieces of kuchen. He didn’t let go of her hand until his mom carried him to the car.

The last car left at nine. I stood in the yard and watched the taillights go up the gravel toward the blacktop. Then I sat down on our back step and shook for a while.

Merritt sat down next to me.

“He wasn’t drunk,” I said. “Myles doesn’t drink. He wasn’t mad, either. Not the way you’d think.”

“Then what was he?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for two hours.”