What happened at the barn
He followed us home. I drove slowly, and I could see his pickup in my mirror the whole way, and behind his pickup, Abe’s, and behind Abe’s, another one I did not know.
When we pulled into our barn lot, Clover was still hollering.
Russ got out and walked to the door and took the brass key out of Noelle’s hand, gently, and opened the padlock. He pulled it off the hasp and put it in his pocket. Then he swung the door open himself.
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The three goats came straight to Noelle. Clover put her front feet up on her chest, which she is not supposed to do, and Noelle did not correct her.
She had them on the stand and milked out inside of twenty minutes. Clover first, because Clover was the fullest and the loudest. I held the pail for her. My hands were shaking and hers were not.
Russ stood just outside the barn door the whole time, in the sun, with his hat in his hand. Abe and the other man stood out by the trucks. Nobody said much.
When she finished with Clover, Russ cleared his throat.
“I’m going to fix that door,” he said, and pointed at the rotted corner where Clover had stuck her nose out. “Before winter.”
“Thank you,” Noelle said.
He nodded. Then he walked back to his pickup, and I watched him stop at the driver’s side door and stand there.
The soap
I did not know she had done it until later.
When we were loading the jar back in the car at the feed store, before Russ followed us home, Noelle had walked around to the front of his pickup while he was talking to Ozzie. The driver’s window was down, the way men leave them in summer.
She had a bar of soap in the pocket of her shorts. Oatmeal and honey, wrapped in brown paper and tied with the jute string she bought by the spool. She always carried one, in case somebody asked what she made.
She set it on his dashboard, right in the middle, above the steering wheel where he could not miss it.
That is what he was looking at, standing by his door in our barn lot. A little brown paper package tied with string, and her name written on the label in her careful handwriting, the way she signed all of them.
He did not take it out and look at it. He just stood there with one hand on the top of the door.
Then he got in and drove away slowly, and I saw him lift one finger off the steering wheel to Abe as he passed, the way men wave on a county road.