The Corn Behind the Padlocked Bins

“Gramps would’ve liked Hollis,” he said.

“Gramps would’ve liked you.”

We stood there a while longer.

On Thursday Trent drove out to Helen Ostrander’s place with a pie from the bakery and a thank-you note he had written out twice. She cried.

She held his face in both hands in her kitchen and told him Gordon would have shaken his hand.

Then she told him that the thirty acres were his again next year if he wanted them, at the same rent, and that she would write it down on something better than a church bulletin.

Neil came home on Saturday with three states of dust on his boots, shook our son’s hand and held on a second too long, and I turned to the stove so neither of them would see my face.

Randy did not come to dinner that week. He did not come to the next one either. His truck passed our house twice on the county road, slowly, both times in the evening, and did not stop.

He did not call. I did not call him. I have picked up the phone a dozen times, and each time I have set it down again, because I do not know yet what I would say.

On the first Sunday in November, we went to church, the three of us together, and we sat in our usual pew.

Helen Ostrander was two rows up, in her good coat, and she turned once and gave Trent a small, firm nod. Pat Meier shook his hand in the narthex.

Randy’s pew was empty. It had been empty since the end of October.

Trent sat beside me, singing, with his grandfather’s bad tenor and no fear of it. That afternoon he took the Folgers can down from his room, rinsed it out, and set it on the kitchen windowsill with a pencil in it.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Next year’s tickets,” he said. “I’m going to need a clean can.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, and he let me, and we stood there a while at the window, looking out at the yard and the empty fields and the long low light on the stubble, neither of us saying anything, my son and I, with all of it behind us and the whole spring still to come.

That night, after Neil and Trent had gone up, the phone rang in the kitchen. I looked at it for a long while.

The screen said Randy, and under it, the way it has for twenty years, the little photograph of the two of us at the county fair, the summer I was nine and he was fourteen, squinting into the sun with a cotton candy between us.

I let it ring.

I stood at the sink with my hands in the dishwater, and I watched the light in the window, and I let it ring all the way through, and when it stopped, I did not call back.

I dried the last cup, set it in the cupboard, and turned off the kitchen light.

There is a can on my windowsill now, with a pencil in it, and a receipt in the bottom.

My son wrote one word on the lid in marker, in his square careful hand.

Ticket.