The Barn Deposits and the Engstrom Barn

I knocked on their kitchen door at two in the afternoon. Vera opened it with flour to her elbows and said, “Well, look who it is,” and had a pan of lemon bars in front of me on the table before I had finished sitting down.

Wilbur came in from the shop and sat by the window with his elbows on his knees, and I told them everything, plain, start to finish, without one bad word about Norbert. When I finished nobody spoke. A clock ticked above the stove.

“How many people, the biggest one?” Wilbur said.

“A hundred and forty. Paige and Garrett.”

“Hm.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We held the whole county in that barn for Gustav Kowalski’s sixtieth birthday. Nineteen seventy-nine. Had three hundred and some. We ran out of coffee by eight.”

“Wilbur,” Vera said.

“I’m telling her it’ll hold.”

“Honey, we are not charging those kids a dime,” she said. “Maybe for the electric. We’ll talk about the electric.”

I opened my mouth to say something proper, and what came out was a sound I do not make in front of other people. I put my hand over it.

Vera came around the table and sat down beside me, and she did not say anything, and she did not pat my back. She just sat so close that her shoulder was against mine, and let me.

“Seventeen days,” she said finally. “That barn hasn’t been swept since Reagan. Wilbur, call the boys.”

I had no idea who the boys were. Within an hour I knew.

The Lutheran church lent forty folding tables and two hundred chairs, carried over in the beds of pickups by confirmation boys. The Legion hall lent its coffee urns. Somebody’s husband brought a hay wagon of straw bales for seating along the walls.

Drew hauled Gustav’s old farm tables out of Norbert’s machine shed. Gustav had built those tables for the family, and Drew did not ask anyone’s leave. He borrowed a flatbed from the co-op, loaded the tables one at a time, tied them down with ratchet straps, and drove them eleven miles to the Engstroms’ on county roads at twenty-five miles an hour.

And the floor. I had not thought about the floor. I thought we would just put a hundred and forty people on poured concrete and folding chairs, and maybe the band would not mind.

But Drew had been quiet for two days, and on the third night I went out to the garage at ten o’clock and found him standing in front of a stack of leftover maple boards, the very ones he had cut for the barn and had not needed.

“I’ve got enough here for a dance floor,” he said. “Eight sections. If I cut them to fit together like a puzzle, with the tongue and groove, they’ll lie flat. I’d need about two nights.”

“Drew, you don’t have to build another floor.”

“Ashlyn’s grandpa is eighty-eight,” he said. He did not turn around. “He is not walking down a hay bale.”

He built it in two nights. The first time I saw it laid out in the Engstrom barn, glowing in the light that came through the loft doors, I had to go sit in the truck.

And I did my own part, which was the flowers. I had a hundred and forty guests’ worth of arrangements to build and no barn to build them in, so I built them in the Engstroms’ machine shed, which smelled like diesel and clean oil, on a workbench that Wilbur covered with butcher paper.