The Combine Across the Street

“How many bars left?” “Forty-one, from Lester Dolan. That is all that is left in the wagon.”

“And Amber?” “Still at the school.” “Marlow Foods closes at four on Saturdays,” he said. “I’ll go.”

“Curtis. Your truck.” “Tim, can the truck sit?” “It can sit till Christmas,” said Tim.

He came back at 3:50 with a shopping cart.

He pushed it up the middle of Elm Street, past the line, past the parked pickups, with six boxes of thirty-six full-size bars stacked in it, paid for with the folded bills parents had pressed into his hand on the way. The manager at Marlow Foods had come out of the back and cleared the whole candy aisle. He had refused to ring up the sixth box.

“Said it’s from the store,” Curtis told me quietly, setting it down. “Said his own boy used to be the kid nobody picked.”

I did not trust myself to answer. Owen saw his father. I will not forget his face. He lit up like a porch light.

“Dad! Dad, look! I did the whole thing! I’m out and then I’m not out and now it’s a lot!”

“I see that, bud,” said Curtis. He knelt down on the pavement, in front of everybody, grain dust and all. “I see it. Is that the combine you were building?”

People ask why Curtis did not walk over to the school lot and tell his sister what he thought of her. He wanted to. I could see it in his neck.

But his son was in a combine and there were children waiting. He decided, standing on the pavement with the truck flashers going, that the kind thing and the loud thing were two different things, and he picked.

Todd Hartwell, Amber’s husband, crossed the street at 3:35 with a pumpkin of fun-size candy in his hand and stood in line with the dads. When he got to the front he told Owen it was the best combine he had ever seen, nodded to me, and walked back without a word about his wife.

Hallie came at 3:40. She was seven. She wore a pink princess dress with a satin sash and a plastic crown, over leggings, with a puffy coat on top because it was forty-eight degrees.

She came through the line without her father, on her own, with her crown crooked and a pumpkin bucket swinging.

She stopped when she saw Owen. “You’re the combine,” she said. “Yeah.” “Everybody in the school lot said the combine was across the street.”

“Did your mom say you could come?” “No. I left.” I felt Owen go still.

He did not say anything. He looked at his cousin, in her crown and her coat, and his chin trembled.

Then he reached down into the corner of the wagon, where a single bar sat apart from all the rest, with its brown wrapper and a picture of an almond on the front.

He had saved it since morning. “That one’s yours,” he said. “It’s the one with the almonds. I kept it.”