“I was wrong at the school,” Lonnie said. “I was wrong in 2006 too. I’ve known that one a long time. I just couldn’t make myself say it.”
Dad did not say anything. The wind moved the windbreak trees behind the house. A pheasant went up out of the ditch and sailed off over the wheat.
“The fence is fine where it is,” Lonnie said. “It always was. I just wanted you to hear me say that, in daylight, with somebody watching.”
He nodded toward the car. He had seen us all along.
Dad took the pie. He held it in both hands, and he looked down at that lopsided crust for a long moment, and then he stepped back from the door and held it open with his shoulder.
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“Well, don’t stand out there,” he said. “It’s cold. Come in and we’ll find out if it’s any good.”
Lonnie went in.
Dolores put her hand over her mouth in the driver’s seat. Then she started the car, and we drove back up the road to my house, and neither of us said anything until we were in my kitchen with the kettle on.
“Do you think they’ll be all right?” she asked.
“I think Dad’s going to tell him the crust is lopsided,” I said.
She laughed so hard she had to sit down.
What I think about now
Lonnie stayed at Dad’s for two hours that afternoon. I know because I could see his pickup from my kitchen window, and I looked more times than I am going to admit.
Dad never told me what they talked about. When I asked, the next day, he said they talked about wheat prices and the Chiefs and the pie, which was, in his words, “not bad for a board member.”
In March, Lonnie came over with his tractor and helped Dad’s renter pull a stuck planter out of the low spot by the creek.
In May, he drove Dad to his eye appointment in Great Bend when I had to cover a route.
They are not best friends. They are two old men who live a half mile apart on a section line road.
But they speak now, and when they pass on the gravel, both of them lift two fingers off the steering wheel.
Every November now, a student reads the names at the Veterans Day assembly. The first year it was Jaden.
He had graduated in May and enlisted, and he was home on leave after his Army training that week, so the school asked him to read the names. He read Dad’s name first, and he said it right. Wendelin. Every syllable.
Lonnie sat in the bleachers that year, a few rows up from me. When Jaden read Dad’s name, Lonnie was the first one on his feet.
Dad raised his hand all the way.