I told Luke that same evening.
I waited until the kids were asleep. Hailey was eight then, and Cody was five. They’d already had a hard winter losing their grandma. They didn’t need to hear anything bad about their grandpa.
Luke listened with both hands flat on the kitchen counter.
When I finished, he didn’t say anything for a long time.
“He said that at the co-op,” Luke said finally. “At the coffee table.”
“That’s what Merle told me.”
If you didn’t grow up out here, the co-op coffee table is a long folding table by the seed counter. There’s a coffee pot nobody ever washes and a coffee can for quarters. The same eight or ten men sit there every morning at six-thirty.
They settle the weather. The markets. The Huskers. And everybody else’s business.
Whatever gets said at that table is all over the county by noon.
And this was all over the county by now.
Luke rubbed his face with both hands.
“Amy. He just buried Mom. I’m not going to drive over there and fight him over a sentence.”
“I’m not asking you to,” I said.
“I know he’s wrong about you.” He looked at me then. “I know that. I just don’t know how to tell my dad he’s wrong right now. I don’t think he’d hear it from anybody.”
Luke isn’t a coward. And he isn’t a fool.
He was a thirty-seven-year-old man whose mother had been gone fourteen weeks. He loved his father. And he could see his father wasn’t right yet.
So I didn’t push him.
I lay awake that night next to Luke and listened to the furnace kick on and off.
And somewhere around two in the morning, I made up my mind.
Grant Ostrander was a man from Denver who wanted somewhere to shoot pheasants a few weeks out of the year.
Men like that sell.
Maybe in two years. Maybe in twenty. But someday, he’d sell.
And when he did, we were going to be standing there with the money.
And I wasn’t going to spend those years angry at Walt Brandt.
Anger is expensive. And I was going to need every dollar.
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