The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

Every field had its corn shocks standing, and every porch had its pumpkins. I had driven that road a thousand times and I had never seen it before.

Aaron was in the driveway when we turned in. He was still in his orange road crew vest, standing next to his truck with his phone in his hand and his face gray. He had gotten my message at 3:40, and he had driven the thirty minutes home at a speed I will not repeat.

“Is he all right?” he said, before I had killed the engine.

Wyatt hopped down off the fender and held up the check.

Aaron read it. He read it again. Then he sat down on the running board of his truck, a grown man in an orange vest, and put his face in both his hands, and I stood in the driveway with my boy and watched my husband cry for his father.

We did not tell him the whole thing that night. We told it at supper, a piece at a time, between bites of meatloaf nobody tasted. When I got to the part about the twenty dollars, Aaron put his fork down and went out to the porch and did not come back for ten minutes.

When he did he said only, “That old man. That stubborn, quiet old man.”

Wyatt did not buy a headstone. He thought about it for two days and decided his grandfather would not have wanted a hundred and fifty dollars spent on a rock.

Instead, on Sunday after church, he carried the biggest Howden left in the barn to the cemetery on the hill and set it on the grass in front of the stone, stem up.

Then he took a folded twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and tucked it under the stem.

“For the next kid,” he said.

I did not say anything. I have learned something this fall about the things you do not say.

He put the other sixty-four dollars, the lawn money, back in his pocket, and the rest of the check went into the bank on Monday morning in an account with his name on it and mine beside it.

Aaron walked in with him. The teller had a ribbon of orange paper stuck to her window. She asked Wyatt what he planned to do with it.

“Seed,” he said. “And a better disc.”

Nobody has asked Jordan Underwood to Thanksgiving. Aaron heard he sold the new washing shed to a man in Ashland County for twenty-two thousand dollars.

I do not hate him. I think about him sometimes at night, a big man in a truck on a township road with no card to hold on Friday afternoons for as long as the board’s paper stands. I hope he gets through the winter. I hope he is a better man in the spring. I would be glad to see it.

But I will not wave at him on the road, and I am done pretending that I owe him a hug.

The Folgers can is on the shelf above the kitchen table now, washed out and empty. Wyatt keeps his spring seed in a new one beside it. On the lid of the old can, in the square pencil printing he learned from watching his grandfather’s labels, he has written one word with a marker.

Next.