Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

Bryce’s column was easy. Nineteen days. Seven hours a day when you counted the walk to the far fields. One hundred thirty-three hours, every one of them in his pencil.

Caden’s was ninety-six. Carson’s was ninety-six, the same, because the boys had quit at the same times on the same days, and Bryce had written it all down without ever thinking it would matter.

I multiplied. Fifteen times ninety-six was fourteen hundred forty, and each of Roger’s boys had made exactly that. Fifteen times a hundred thirty-three was nineteen hundred ninety-five. What my son had actually been paid was ten sixty-four.

Nine hundred thirty-one dollars. That was the gap, to the penny, between what Roger paid his family and what he paid mine.

I wrote the number at the bottom in red pen, circled it, and sat there looking at it in the kitchen light. Mitch had come in from the shower and was standing behind my chair with a towel around his neck.

He kissed the top of my head and went to bed. In the morning he put on his good shirt, and I saw him fold the plat map along its creases and slide it into my purse without being asked.

“I’m not mad,” I said, and I realized as I said it that it was true. I wasn’t. What I felt was colder and steadier than anger, a kind of quiet arithmetic, and I had learned a long time ago that cold beats hot.

Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s is the oldest standing appointment in my family. One o’clock, after church, in the white farmhouse on County Road 1100 with the wraparound porch and the porch swing that has never once been quiet.

That Sunday there were fifteen of us. Grandma Esther at the head, her white hair pinned up the way she has worn it for fifty years. Roger at the far end, in his Sunday shirt with the pearl snaps. His wife Lorene beside him. Caden and Carson on either side, shoveling potatoes.

Mitch and I took the middle, with Bryce between us and Delaney on a phone book on her chair. Grandma’s sister was there, and a few cousins from Peoria. Ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans from the garden, three kinds of rolls and a Jell-O salad nobody would admit they liked.

Roger said the blessing, the way he always does, long and sincere. I will say that for him, he has always meant his prayers. Then everybody loaded up and the table filled with the sound of forks and the usual talk about weather, rain, prices and who was doing what.

“Best stand of beans I’ve had in ten years,” Roger said, around a mouthful of ham. “Cleanest fields in the township. The boys did a real job this July.”

“They sure did,” Lorene said.

“Every row,” Roger said. He looked down the table at his sons with something like pride, and then, almost as an afterthought, he glanced across at my boy. “Bryce helped some too. Good for a first year.”

Bryce was cutting his ham. He kept cutting, but I saw the back of his neck go red.

I put down my fork. I did not feel anything dramatic. My hands were steady, my heart was steady, and what I mostly felt was the weight of the folded paper in my purse by my foot.