The Sweet Corn My Son Planted Twice

Shane looked at the wagon. He looked at Colby. Then he set the box of corn on the hood of his pickup, and he walked down into the field past me without a word, and he started picking ears into the wagon.

I did not stop him. I did not help him either. I stood there at the edge of the field and watched my ex-husband pick sweet corn for our son.

After a minute, Colby came down too. He picked the next row over. They did not talk. They worked side by side until the wagon was full, and then Shane hitched it to my dad’s pickup and pulled it up to the corner, and Colby jumped off and started unloading it into boxes.

Before he left, Shane stood by his own pickup for a minute with the box of corn in his hands.

“I was wrong,” he said. He said it to Colby, not to me. “It was wrong. I don’t have anything else to say about it.”

Colby looked at him. “Okay,” he said.

That was all. Shane put the corn in his pickup and drove away.

My dad leaned back in his lawn chair and said, “Well,” and that was the most anybody said about it all day.

The Count

Colby sold the last dozen on the twenty-second of September, the week before the first frost. A late planting all comes ready at once, and we picked every ear of it in thirteen days.

He kept every number in a spiral notebook, the way my dad taught him. He sat at the kitchen table that night with the notebook and the coffee can and a calculator and added it all up twice.

Fourteen hundred dozen. At five dollars a dozen, seven thousand dollars, give or take what he gave away to people who did not have the money.

Plus Opal’s hundred.

He paid me back the four hundred and eighteen dollars for the seed, though I told him not to. He paid his grandpa forty dollars for the diesel the disk had burned, though Dad told him not to either. And he put the rest in the credit union in town, in the account he had opened when he was thirteen.

October

Colby turned sixteen on the eleventh of October. He took his driving test that Tuesday, passed it the first time, and that Saturday, he and my dad drove to a dealer in Waukon who had a used pickup on the back lot.

It was eleven years old, with a bench seat and a hitch, and a hundred and eighty-one thousand miles. He paid sixty-five hundred dollars for it, cash out of the credit union, and my dad checked the oil and kicked every tire before he let him sign.

I was standing in the yard when he drove it home. He pulled in slow and careful, both hands on the wheel, and stopped right next to the corner where the corn had been.

He got out and stood there a minute, looking at the stubble.

“Mom,” he said. “Is it all right if I go somewhere first?”

I knew where he meant. I did not ask.

“It’s your truck,” I said.

So he got back in, and he pulled out onto the county blacktop, and he turned north.

Colby bought the truck in October and drove it to his dad’s first.