Josie called me at nine-forty on a Saturday morning in March, and she was whispering from a bathroom. I knew before she said a word that something had been taken from her.
“Mom, it’s gone.”
“What’s gone, honey?”
“My jacket. Shauna burned it.”
I was in the feed room at the home place with a fifty-pound sack of mineral in my arms. I set it down very carefully, the way you set down something that might go off.
My name is Phoebe Petrie. I am forty-two years old, I keep the books at the grain elevator in Winner, and I run forty head of Hereford cows on the home section my father still calls his own, though I do the work now.
Josie is my daughter. She is sixteen, and every other weekend she goes to her dad’s house in town, where he lives with his wife of two years.
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“Slow down,” I said. “Where are you?”
“The bathroom. I’m running the water so she can’t hear.” Her voice cracked on the last word and she swallowed it back. “She said it smelled like the barn. She put it in the burn barrel behind the shop, and she lit it, and she stood there until it was done.”
“Where was your dad?”
“The bull sale in Fort Pierre. He left at six. His phone’s in the truck, Mom, you know he never hears it at a sale.”
I did know that. In nineteen years of knowing Alvin Hoffman, I had never once reached him at a sale barn. He is a decent man who goes quiet when the auctioneer starts, and that quiet had just cost my daughter something.
The jacket
I need to tell you what that jacket was, because if you have never worn one you might think it was only clothing.
It was an official FFA jacket, the blue corduroy kind with the gold emblem on the chest, the kind that has not changed much since my own mother wore one in 1971. Josie bought it herself, with steer money, the winter she turned thirteen.
She wore it to every meeting and every contest. She wore it the way some women wear a wedding ring, with a kind of private pride that did not need anyone to notice.
Josie’s speech at district was the following Saturday. It was seven minutes, memorized, in prepared public speaking, and it was the thing she had worked on harder than anything in her life.
The rules are plain about it. Official dress means the jacket, the white blouse, the black skirt or slacks, the scarf, the black shoes. No jacket, no official dress. No official dress, and the judges dock the score before she says her first word.
“Stay where you are,” I said. “I’m coming.”
“Mom, don’t.” The whisper went sharp. “Please don’t make it worse. I have to come back here in two weeks. If you go off on her, I’m the one who has to eat supper across from her.”
That was the whole of it, right there. I could have called Alvin’s phone forty times. I could have called the sheriff, though I could not have told him what crime I meant. I could have called a lawyer, and said the words “custody” and “pattern.”
And Josie would have paid for every one of those calls, at that table, every other weekend, until she turned eighteen.
“All right,” I said. “I’m just coming to get you. I won’t say a thing.”