The Sweet Corn Sign on My Tailgate

Then he said, quietly, to Grandpa, “There’s a meeting Tuesdays in the church basement in Washington. For people like me. I’m going this Tuesday. I wanted you to know.”

“Good,” Grandpa said. “You go.”

Lowell nodded. He looked at me for the first time. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. Whatever I might have said on the phone that night in Grandpa’s lane, the market had already said it for me, and better than I could have.

He walked back across the grass with his sack of corn. People stepped aside for him. Nobody said anything ugly, and nobody patted him on the back either.

They just let him go. And when he got to the curb, he stood by his truck for a second and looked back at his father sitting in the sun.

Ottilie came around her table then and put a jar of honey into the corner of the empty truck bed, right next to the burlap.

“For Emmett’s Christmas baking,” she said, and went back to her bees without another word.

The line drifted apart. People went back to the bread table and the pie table and the coffee wagon. The noise came back, a little at a time.

The old man in the seed cap came over and shook Grandpa’s hand one more time, and said, “Good corn, Emmett,” and that was all.

I started folding the burlap. My arms felt like they belonged to somebody else. Tobin was standing next to Grandpa’s lawn chair, very still, with his hand in his shirt pocket.

“Grandpa,” he said. “Can you open the can back up?”

Grandpa looked at him. Then he worked the lid off again with his thumbs and held the can out. Tobin pulled a dollar bill out of his shirt pocket.

It was folded in half, and then in half again, small and soft from being in his pocket all morning.

“This is the first one,” Tobin said. “From the first time I made change. When Ottilie bought her corn. I saved it for you.”

He put it in the can on top of Lowell’s twenties. “So it’s not just Uncle Lowell’s money in there. So some of it’s from today.”

Grandpa didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he reached up with his shaking hand and took Tobin’s face in it, the way he used to take mine, his rough old palm along my son’s cheek.

“That’s the best dollar in this can,” he said. “That’s the one I’m going to remember.”

I had to turn around and fold the burlap again. I folded it about four times. Ottilie was watching from behind her honey jars, and when I finally looked over at her, she was wiping her eyes with the corner of her change apron, and she just nodded at me.

We packed up the lawn chair and the cash box. Tobin carried the coffee can to the truck in both hands like it was full of eggs.

I went to untie Grandma’s sign from the tailgate, and Grandpa said, “Leave it.”

“It’ll blow around on the highway, Grandpa.”

“It held on for forty years at the end of that lane in every wind there is,” he said. “It’ll hold for twelve miles. Leave it on, Wren.”