The Florida truck was due at half past seven. At twenty after, with the frost still white on the gravel and the sun just over the ridge, my ex-husband Kip Absher backed his pickup to the landing and dropped his hitch onto my equipment trailer.
On that trailer sat the tree shaker and the powered netter, bolted side by side the way my daddy had set them up years before.
Nine hundred cut Fraser firs lay in long rows on the gravel all around it, waiting to go to Florida.
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“Kip,” I said. I was standing by the barn door with a cup of coffee in one gloved hand.
“There is a semi coming up this mountain in ten minutes for those trees. You know that. You have known that date since August.”
He did not look at me. He pinned the hitch, crossed the safety chains under the tongue, and plugged in the light cord like any careful man would.
Kip was always careful with equipment. It was people he got loose with.
“That shaker went on my name the year we married,” he said, straightening up.
“I made the payments. The netter too. I have told you that for three years, Dovie, and you have told me to take it up with a judge.”
“It went on the farm account,” I said. “The farm paid for it. My daddy’s farm paid for every bolt on that trailer, and you were drawing wages from that same account the whole time you made those payments.”
“My sweat paid for it.” He climbed into the cab and leaned out the window with his arm along the door.
“You want to net nine hundred trees today, you go buy yourself a netter. I hear they sell them down in Hickory.”
Then he pulled out slow, the trailer rattling down off the landing onto the farm road, past my mother’s porch, out to the state road and down toward the river.
I stood there holding that coffee until it went cold in my glove.