So I left it on. We drove home through the middle of the afternoon with Grandma’s sign hanging off my tailgate, Emmett’s Sweet Corn in faded black letters, and Tobin asleep against Grandpa’s shoulder with the cash box in his lap and Grandpa’s coffee can between his own two feet.
When we got to the farm, Grandpa sat down at his kitchen table and counted the can out into piles, the way he does every December.
It was nine hundred and one dollars. Then he counted the cash box, two hundred ninety-five once I took out the forty for change, plus Lowell’s five.
He put all of it back into the can together and set the can back on its shelf over the sink.
“That’s twelve hundred and one,” Tobin said. “That’s more than last year, Grandpa.”
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“That’s a lot of Christmas,” Grandpa said. He took the folded envelope with his list on it out of his shirt pocket, where he had carried it all morning, and he put it back into the can on top of the money, and he put the lid on.
I didn’t hear anything from Lowell for two weeks. Then, the second Sunday in September, he walked into church late and sat down in the back pew by himself.
After the service he came up to Grandpa on the steps and shook his hand. They talked about the bean harvest. Neither one of them mentioned the can.
He has been going to those meetings on Tuesdays. I know because Arlo’s cousin drives past that church on her way home, and she says his truck is in the lot every week.
He hasn’t said much about it to me, and I haven’t asked. That’s his to tell.
In December, I drove Grandpa to the farm store and the dime store with his list on the back of the envelope. He bought eleven Christmas presents.
He bought a sled and a doll and a set of watercolors and a fishing pole. He bought Tobin his pocketknife a year early. “He earned it,” Grandpa said. “He made change.”
Lowell came to Christmas dinner at Grandpa’s that year. He brought a pan of sweet corn he had cut off the cob in August and frozen, from that last dozen he bought at the market.
He didn’t say anything about where it came from. He set it on the table next to the ham, and Grandpa looked at it, and then looked at his son, and passed it to me first.
Grandpa will be eighty-seven this spring. He says he is planting the sweet corn again. Two acres, three batches, the same patch behind the machine shed.
Arlo has already told him he will till it. Tobin has already told him he will run the cash box.
And Grandma’s sign is still tied to my tailgate. I never took it off. It rode home from the market that Saturday in August, and it has ridden to work and to church and to the grocery store every day since, Emmett’s Sweet Corn in faded black letters on the back of my truck.
People wave at it. Old men at the gas station ask me if Emmett’s still growing corn. I tell them yes, he is, and come out to the market in August and see him.
He’ll be in the green lawn chair, beside my tailgate, with his coffee can on his knee.