The Notice After the Last Beans

The check for the band was the one that did it. Four thousand two hundred dollars, made out to a group from Peoria that played country covers, signed by my father in law and written out in my handwriting.

I kept the books for Brunner Farms. I had kept them for ten years. Every check that left that account went through my hands first, and Judy asked me to write this one on a Tuesday in June.

“Make it out to the name on the invoice,” she said, and set the paper on her kitchen table. “Vern will sign it when he comes in for dinner.”

Dinner is noon on a farm in Bureau County. Supper is the evening meal. Judy had put dinner on that table at noon for forty years, and she was not changing for a wedding.

So I wrote it. Then I wrote the tent rental, and the caterer’s deposit, and the man who was going to string lights from the rafters of the old Henderson barn east of Princeton.

Then I added it up, because adding things up is what I do.

Sixty thousand two hundred dollars. That was the wedding, start to finish, with the flowers and the photographer and the rented chairs and the band from Peoria.

It came from fourteen thousand bushels of last year’s corn that Vern hauled out of the bin and sold at four thirty. I had written that settlement into the ledger myself.

I sat at Judy’s table with the pen in my hand and looked at the number, and then I turned back a few pages to March.

In March I had asked Vern for five hundred dollars more a month.

I had asked him in the shop, not in front of anybody, the way you ask a man for something when you want to give him room to say yes.

The furnace in our single-wide had quit twice that winter. Nate had rebuilt the blower motor on our kitchen floor at two in the morning with his breath showing.

“We’re not asking for the moon,” I told Vern. “We’d like to put a little away. We’d like to think about a baby someday without doing the math first.”

Vern was greasing the planter. He did not look up for a while.

“There’s no money this year, Holly,” he said. “Prices are what they are. You’ve got a roof and the lights are paid. That’s more than I had at your age.”

That was in March. In June, fourteen thousand bushels went out of the bin for a barn wedding.

I closed the ledger and set the pen on top of it and waited for Vern to come in for dinner.

He signed every check without reading them. He trusted me. That was the part that sat in my chest like a stone for the rest of the summer.