The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

I held that can in my lap and I could not think of one thing to say.

That evening I called Lowell. The sun was still up, low and orange over the beans across the road, and I sat in my truck in Grandpa’s lane so Grandpa wouldn’t hear. It rang a long time before he picked up.

“Where’s Grandpa’s money, Lowell?”

There was a long quiet on the line. Then he said, “Wren, that’s between me and Dad.”

“It’s the kids’ Christmas. It’s Tobin’s Christmas. It’s eleven kids’ Christmas.”

Another quiet. I could hear a television behind him, a ball game. Then he said it, and I believe it was the most honest thing he had said in a year.

“I had a bad run down on the boat. I was going to win it back before he ever missed it. I had it figured.”

The boat is the casino boat on the river, an hour and a half away. I knew he went down there.

Everybody in the family knew he went down there. I had not known it had gotten to where it had gotten.

“You took an eighty-six-year-old man’s Christmas money to the casino,” I said. I did not raise my voice.

I have never been a yeller. My mother was a yeller and I promised myself a long time ago.

“It’s coming to me anyway,” Lowell said. “When Dad goes, half that farm is mine. It’s my inheritance, Wren. I just took a little of it early. That’s all it is.”

I hung up on him. It was the first time in my life I had ever hung up on anybody.

I sat in the truck with the phone in my lap and watched the swallows working over the corn patch until my hands quit shaking.

The next morning I went back over before work. I had decided in the night what I was going to do.

I was going to drive to the sheriff’s office in Washington and tell them exactly what happened, and let Lowell explain himself to somebody besides me.

Grandpa was sitting on the back step with his coffee when I pulled in. I told him what Lowell said on the phone, all of it, the boat and the inheritance. Then I told him what I meant to do.

He set his cup down on the step very carefully. “No,” he said.

“Grandpa, he stole from you.”

“He’s my boy,” Grandpa said. “He’s the only son I’ve got, and your grandma would come up out of that ground if she heard I’d had him called a thief in front of the whole county. I won’t do it, Wren. I won’t have it done.”

“Then what are we supposed to do? Just let him?”

Grandpa looked out at the corn for a long while. “I’ve got one picking left,” he said. “The last planting. It’ll be ready Friday, Saturday at the latest.”

That was all he said. But I knew him. I had known him my whole life.

And I understood that he was not giving up. He was telling me where he still had something to stand on.

So I did not call the sheriff. I did not call my mother or my aunts, either, though Lord knows they would have had plenty to say.