The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

She is Ben’s mother, seventy-four, and she drove the four miles from her house in her slippers and her good wool coat. She sat down at our table without taking the coat off.

“Shane called me,” she said. “He told me what he did.” “What did he say?” I asked.

“That he’s scared.” She wrapped both hands around the mug I put in front of her. “He’s three loads short of quota every day since Friday.

The co-op watches that number. If a hauler falls short too many days, the contract goes to somebody else next year.”

“So he took his brother’s truck and gave it to the one man in town who closes the Legion.” “I’m not defending him,” Dorothy said. “I’m telling you why.”

She did not say anything else for a minute. When she did, her voice was smaller. “I raised those boys. I don’t know where he got this from.”

I did not have an answer for her. I got up and refilled her cup and stood at the sink with my back to the room, looking out at the soybean stubble across the road.

There were things I could have done, and I spent most of that morning going through them.

I could have called the co-op office in town. But the hauling contract was in Shane’s name, and the co-op does not take calls from a driver’s wife.

The ag office would have written down my number and told me they’d look into it, and by the time they looked, harvest would be over.

I could have driven to the shop and shouted at Shane. It would have felt wonderful for ten minutes.

Then it would have cost us the season, and Thanksgiving with his mother, and whatever the two brothers still had between them.

I could have waited it out. Ben had a cast for six weeks. The season was not going to wait for him.

And I could not do the thing Ben wanted me to do, which was nothing, because he did not actually want it.

He wanted somebody to say it was wrong. He just did not want to be the one who had to ask.

So I did what I always do when I do not know what to do. I called someone who knew more than me.

Clarence Hegg ran the piling station out on Highway 17. He was sixty-one, with a white mustache and a voice like gravel in a coffee can, and he had coached Ben in Legion baseball twenty years earlier.

At our wedding he’d told everyone Ben had the best arm in Walsh County and the worst judgment in his choice of pitches.

He answered on the second ring. “I heard,” he said, before I could say anything. “Shane’s boys told the loader operator and the loader operator told me. I’m sorry, Stephanie.”

“Is Greg driving Unit 7?” “Greg drove Unit 7,” Clarence said, “for one load. He was weaving in the line at the scale. I pulled him off.

Then I checked his paperwork, and his federal medical card ran out in August. He can’t legally haul a beet. Not for me, not for anybody.”

“Where’s the truck?” “Parked behind Shane’s shop since noon. Shane’s out hunting another friend.” I looked across the kitchen at my husband. He was staring at the wall.