The Beet Truck in the Grove

What I did, when she came back over the scale to weigh out, was lean out my window. She had to stop beside me because the Ford was in the way of the exit.

“Shayla,” I said.

She looked over. She looked like she was waiting to get hit.

“Brent knows where my yard is,” I said. “That’s all. You tell him that.”

She held my eyes a second. Then she nodded, very small, and pulled around me and out onto the county road.

Ingrid let out a breath beside me that I don’t think she knew she had been holding.

“You could have said a lot worse, Mom,” she said.

“I could have,” I said. “Write down the ticket.”

We hauled the last of the nine acres by half past five that afternoon.

Arvid lifted the last six rows along the shelterbelt with the sun throwing the shadows of the trees all the way across the field, and when the last beets came up the boom and into the Ford, he shut the harvester down and climbed out and stood in the dirt with his hands on his hips.

Lorene had come out to watch. She was standing by her car with her arms folded inside her coat. Ingrid was on the running board.

I drove that last load to the piler in the long gold light of the evening. Odell waved me around the line one more time.

When I came back across the scale he was standing outside the scale house with his hard hat in his hand.

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s it.”

He put his hat back on and nodded. “Your grandpa’d be proud of you,” he said. “But he’d tell you the left headlight’s out.”

I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead down on the steering wheel.

That night, it went down to twenty-one degrees. Every beet I owned was on the pile.

Before we went in for supper, Ingrid climbed back into the cab and filled in the space she had left at the bottom of our side.

Finished Oct 17. Froze hard that night. Thank the Lord. Then she handed me the pencil so I could underline it twice, the way he did.

We went to church in the morning. Lorene and Arvid sat behind Ingrid and me like always, and when we sang the old harvest hymn, the one about all good gifts around us, Lorene put her hand on my shoulder from behind for the whole second verse and did not take it off.

We came home a little after noon. I was making sandwiches in the kitchen when Ingrid called from the front room. “Mom. Come look.”

The tandem was coming up our driveway.

Brent was driving it. Just Brent. He pulled it into the yard and parked it beside the shop, where it had always been parked, and shut it off and sat in the cab for a minute. Then he got out.

The truck had been washed. Not hosed off. Washed. The box was clean down to bare steel, the tires were dressed, and the windshield shone in the noon sun like it was new.

I went out on the step. Ingrid came out behind me and stood beside me.

Brent walked over and stopped at the bottom of the steps. He had his good jeans on and his church shirt, which meant he had been to the early service in town and come straight here.

He did not look at me at first. He looked at Ingrid.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said.

“Hi, Dad.”