I was greasing the feed truck that evening.
It was past eight o’clock and still light out. That long June light that makes everything look better than it is. I had the grease gun on the driveline when I heard tires on gravel.
It was Dad’s pickup. The blue three-quarter-ton with the cracked taillight.
For half a second, coming up my lane with the sun behind it, it was him.
Phil got out slowly. His new boots were muddy to the ankles.
He walked across the yard and stopped beside the running board of the feed truck. He looked up at the cab. At the windshield. I knew he could see the gloves.
Then my brother took off his cap.
I had never in my life seen him take his cap off to ask for anything. Not for a loan. Not for a girl. Not at our mother’s bedside.
“Wade,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”
I wiped my hands on a rag.
“Go ahead.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking at out there.” His voice was steady. But it cost him. I could hear it cost him. “I know it’s bad. I don’t know how bad. And I don’t know what to do first. Would you come look at it?”
Four months I’d waited for that sentence.
Some nights, I’d planned exactly what I’d say back. Most of it wasn’t very Christian.
But standing there, what I saw was a man in his fifties holding his cap in both hands in front of his little brother.
And I didn’t have a single one of those speeches left in me.
“Saturday,” I said. “I work till noon.”
He let his breath out.
“I’ll pay you. Whatever you say.”
“You’ll pay the co-op for the spray and the nitrogen. That’ll be enough of a bill.”
I hung the grease gun back on its nail.
“And Phil. I’ll look at it. I’m not saying anything more than that yet.”
“That’s fair.”
“Why Kansas?”
He turned the cap around once in his hands.
“Because they didn’t know me,” he said. “I couldn’t ask you. And everybody else around here would’ve known I hadn’t asked you.”
It was an honest answer.
It was also the exact same answer I’d given Theresa back in April. Just with the words turned around.
“Saturday,” I said again.
He nodded. He looked one more time at the windshield, at the gloves.
Then he drove our father’s pickup back down the lane.
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