Walking Beans for Fifteen Dollars

Roger opened his mouth. I watched him look for something to say. I watched him look at the Peoria cousins, who found their plates very interesting, and at Lorene, who had her hand pressed flat against her collarbone, and at his two sons, who would not meet his eyes.

He pushed back his chair. It scraped the old linoleum, a long ugly sound, and he stood there for a moment with his napkin still tucked in his collar.

Stories like this usually have somebody say sorry. Nobody did. Roger did not speak to Bryce, and he did not speak to me. He pulled the napkin out of his collar, laid it beside his plate, and walked out the screen door onto the porch.

The porch swing creaked once. Then I heard his boots on the steps and his truck door, and a long moment later the engine turning over.

“I’ll be home in a bit,” Lorene said, to no one. She stood, put her napkin down with a hand that shook, and went out after him. She did not look at me either. Their boys stayed in their chairs. Nobody told them to.

For a minute nobody at the table moved.

Then Grandma Esther picked up her fork and said, in the same voice she has used my entire life to announce the weather, “Well. The pie’s the apple. Somebody get the ice cream out of the deep freeze.”

And all fifteen of us, God help us, laughed. Not much. Just enough to let the air back in the room. One of the aunts got up for the ice cream and the Peoria cousins started talking at once, about nothing, about anything, and the whole dinner shook itself loose like a dog coming out of a creek.

Carson was still sitting there with his hands in his lap. After a minute he got up, walked around the table, and put his own dessert plate down in front of Bryce, apple pie and two scoops of vanilla, and went back to his chair without saying a word.

Bryce looked at the pie. Then he looked at me, and I nodded, and he picked up his fork.

After the dishes were done, Grandma asked Bryce to come help her with something in the back bedroom. I started to follow and she waved me off with a dish towel.

“Stay put, Tara. Drink your coffee. This is between me and my grandson.”

They were gone twenty minutes. When they came back, Bryce was carrying a flat gray ledger book with a cracked cloth spine, held against his chest in both hands.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It was Grandpa Abner’s,” Bryce said. His voice was thick. “She said he kept one every summer he worked. Every field, every day, every dollar. For forty-one years.”

“He wrote down everything,” Grandma said from the doorway. She had taken off her glasses and was rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Farmers who write it down never get cheated, and they never cheat anybody. He used to say a number in pencil can’t be argued with.”

“She said I can keep it,” Bryce said. “She said he’d want me to have it. Because I already do it the right way.”

My grandmother put her hand on the top of his head, the way you bless a child, and said nothing. I stood in her kitchen with a coffee cup going cold in my hands and a lump in my throat the size of a fist.