The text came in at 12:52 on a Saturday afternoon in March, while I had a farmer’s grain truck sitting on my scale and the printer chattering out his ticket.
I was the scale clerk at the co-op elevator north of Beatrice, Nebraska.
That meant I weighed every truck in full and weighed it again empty, and the difference was what a man got paid for.
The truck on the scale belonged to a farmer I had known since grade school.
He was hauling the last of his stored corn out of the bins before spring work, and he was in no hurry about anything.
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My phone buzzed on the counter beside the moisture tester. I almost let it go.
Then I saw it was Nora, and Nora did not text me on her dad’s weekends unless something was wrong.
“Grandma says I’m not going. Mom please.”
I read it twice. Then I tore the ticket off the printer, slid it through the window, and told the farmer to have a good one in a voice that did not sound like mine.
Nora was eleven years old. She was in the fifth grade, and in about an hour she was supposed to sing the only solo in the fifth-grade musical, at the Saturday matinee in the elementary school gym.
The show was about the homestead days. Nebraska kids grow up on that story.
There was a pine forest painted on cardboard panels and a covered wagon made out of a refrigerator box and two hula hoops.
Nora played a homestead girl who waits by the river for her father to come home from the land office.
Her song was called “Down by the Big Blue,” and Mr. Ahlberg, the music teacher, had written it himself.
She had sung it in my kitchen every night since the middle of January. She sang it doing dishes.
She sang it brushing her teeth. I knew every word of it, and I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.
The phone buzzed again while I was still holding it.
“She says I’ll only embarrass myself. She took my shoes. I’m in the bathroom.”
I stood there with the second text in my hand and the next truck already rolling up onto the scale. The diesel shook the little scale house window the way it always did.