The Lane We Mowed Across the Hayfield

And she had to sit there and answer them, or not answer them, with two hundred cars rolling past her through a lane her nephew had cut that morning, while her sign went right on saying closed.

At noon I poured a cup of cider and walked it up to her myself.

Lorrie watched me go. Abe watched me go from out on the road.

I felt about every eye in the lot on my back, and I walked slow, so nobody would think I was going up there to fight.

I knocked on the glass. Darla looked at me for a long time. Then she rolled the window down, all the way this time.

Up close, she looked terrible. She had been crying, and she had tried to fix it and made it worse. The thermos was empty. The blanket had slid off onto the floor.

I held out the cider. “It’s cold up here,” I said. “This is the good batch, from the Stayman trees. Your dad’s trees.”

She did not take it. She looked at it in my hand, and then at me. “Did you call Reuben?”

“No.”

“Why not?” She sounded angry and surprised and something else, all at once. “You could have. He’d have come down here and dragged me out by the collar. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what this whole thing is.”

“I did not call him,” I said, “because he’s holding your mother’s hand. And he is going to keep holding it until she doesn’t need him to anymore. Nobody is taking that away from him. Not you and not me.”

She looked down at the steering wheel.

“He called me at six this morning,” I said. “He said Mom woke up for a minute around four. She asked where Darla was. He told her you were coming.”

Darla did not say anything. Her hands were on the wheel, and I watched the knuckles go white and then slowly let go.

“The lane is open,” I said. “It’s been open since ten. You can back out any time you want, and nobody will say a word. You can be in Gettysburg in twenty minutes.”

I set the cup of cider on her dashboard, through the open window, and I walked back to the stand.

I did not look back. I wanted to, but I did not. Behind me I heard the window roll back up.

The afternoon went the way u-pick afternoons go when the weather holds.

The sun came around and warmed everything up, and people took their jackets off and tied them around their waists and stayed longer than they meant to.

Peyton ran the wagon eleven times. I counted. After the first trip he let the little girl in the pink jacket ride up on the fender beside him, with her father holding on to the back of her hood, and she talked his ear off the whole way around.

When her family finally left, around one o’clock, the little girl ran back from their van and threw her arms around Peyton’s legs.

He stood there with his hands up, not knowing what to do with them, red to the ears.

Her mother came over to the money table to pay for an extra half gallon of cider, and she leaned in close to Lorrie and me.

“I don’t know what’s going on with that truck,” she said. “And it’s none of my business. But that boy of yours is a good boy. We’ll be back next year.”