The Hayride Grandma Asked For

The ride home

Bud was waiting in the truck in the parking lot, because Bud does not do sunrooms.

He had stayed for the first half hour, eaten two pumpkin bars, shaken every old man’s hand, and then gone out to sit with the radio and the farm report.

I climbed in and shut the door and didn’t say anything for a minute. Bud looked at me, then turned the radio down.

He’s forty-seven, with a gray beard he started growing the winter our youngest left for the Army, and he works on a road crew for the county.

“What happened,” he said. Not like a question. Bud doesn’t ask questions he already knows the answers to.

I told him. All of it. The walker, the emergency room, the Facebook part, and Grandma folding her napkin into that little square.

By the time I got to the napkin I was crying, which made me mad, because I don’t cry at things like that.

Bud put the truck in gear and pulled out onto the highway and drove a whole mile before he said anything. Then he said, “The flat wagon’s in the shed.”

“Bud.”

“It’s got good tires. I’d have to put rails on it. Seats with backs.”

He was looking straight ahead at the road. “Ivo and Tolbert could use the work. They’re getting fat on that second cutting.”

Ivo and Tolbert are our Belgians. They are blond, the color of wheat straw, with pale manes and white feet, and they weigh a little over a ton apiece.

Bud uses them for the Fourth of July parade, the fall festival, a little logging on his cousin’s place, and plowing our garden.

“Gail said no,” I said.

“Gail’s not the one who asked,” Bud said.