September
By the middle of August, every sweet corn stand in the county had closed. Most of it gets planted in April and May and comes in late July, and by Labor Day there is nobody selling sweet corn on any corner in the county.
Colby’s came in on the tenth of September.
He went out at dawn that morning and pulled back the husk on one ear and pressed his thumbnail into a kernel, and the milk squirted out white. That is how you know. He came running back to the house with the ear in his hand, still in his socks.
“It’s ready,” he said. “Mom. It’s ready.”
We picked that first morning before I went to work. He had painted a sign on a piece of plywood with house paint the night before: “Sweet corn, $5 a dozen.” He put it at the corner by the blacktop and set up on the tailgate of my dad’s old pickup, which Dad had parked there for him for the season.
The first customer was Opal.
She came across the road at seven in the morning in her house shoes, with her purse over her arm, and she bought one dozen. She handed Colby a hundred-dollar bill.
Colby looked at it. “I don’t have change for that, Mrs. Drees,” he said. “I only have about twenty.”
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“I didn’t ask for change,” Opal said. “Put the rest toward the truck.”
He tried to give it back. She would not take it. She took her dozen ears in a plastic bread sack and walked back across the blacktop, and Colby stood there holding that hundred-dollar bill in both hands.
I had to go to the post office then. I was glad, because I did not want my son to see his mother crying over a bread sack of sweet corn at seven in the morning.