There was one more thing. Something I knew that they didn’t know I knew.
I’d seen the letters from the bank in January.
Two bad years in a row of dry summers had left the partnership’s operating line stretched thin. The bank in Hastings had a new loan officer. A young man named Kyle Hoffman. He wanted the balance sheet cleaned up before he’d renew the line for another year.
And a widow holding one-third of a farm partnership was a loose end on a balance sheet.
That night, back home, Abby sat at the kitchen table in her navy funeral dress with her shoes kicked off.
“Mom,” she said. “Are we going to live with Aunt Pam in Hastings now?”
Somebody at the lunch had already said it in front of her. The way people do.
“I don’t know yet, honey,” I said. “I haven’t decided anything.”
“Do we have to leave the house?”
I could have lied. I thought about it.
But she was twelve, and she was a farm kid. And farm kids can smell a lie the same way they can smell rain coming.
“Yes,” I said. “The house belongs to the farm. And the farm belongs to Uncle Randy and Uncle Scott now. They paid us for Dad’s part.”
She thought about that for a long time.
“But Dad’s fields are still here,” she finally said.
“They are.”
“I can see them from my window,” she said. “When he was out planting, I could see the lights going back and forth at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I used to count the passes.”
She got up and went upstairs. I heard her bedroom door close.
I sat at that kitchen table until after midnight. The yard light was shining through the window. And I looked out across the gravel road at the old Wiebe place.
The Wiebe place was eighty acres of dryland ground, with a small white farmhouse and a leaning red barn.
Mrs. Wiebe lived there alone until she went into the care center in Red Cloud three years earlier. She passed away the next August. Harold Fischer had rented the ground for years, but Harold was 78 and retired after last harvest. The Wiebe grandkids in Lincoln had listed the whole place for sale in the fall.
It hadn’t sold.
Nobody wanted an old farmhouse. And the neighbors who wanted the ground were waiting for the price to come down.
Jeff and I used to talk about it sometimes, late at night, the way you talk about things you know you’ll never do.
“If I ever win the lottery,” he’d say, “I’m buying the Wiebe eighty. And I’m giving it to Abby on her eighteenth birthday.”
I got up. I found a pencil and an old seed company calendar. I turned it over to the blank back side.
And I did the arithmetic.
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