“I didn’t ask for your house,” Tyler said. His voice cracked. “I didn’t even know Dad gave you that check at the funeral until Josie told my sister. I would never have taken it. I feel sick about it.”
Then he nodded at the drill. “Uncle Wade taught me to run one of these when I was ten. Let me drive. You haul seed.”
He looked so much like Wade at that age that I couldn’t speak. I just handed him the keys.
We got more done by ten o’clock than I’d done the whole day before.
The seed tender
Around lunch, Dean pulled into my field with the partnership’s big seed tender. He filled my drill without a word, unhooked the tender, and left it sitting at the edge of my field.
“Keep it till you’re done,” he said.
When I thanked him, his eyes got wet. “I should have said something in that hallway, Carol. I just stood there. Wade would be ashamed of me.”
Sunday dinner
That weekend, Curtis’s wife, Brenda, called and asked Josie and me to Sunday dinner. At my old house.
We sat at the same oak table where Wade used to say grace. Before anyone ate, Curtis stood up.
He said the bank had been on him about the operating loan, and he’d panicked. But mostly, he admitted, he’d wanted to set Tyler up the way their dad never set him up. He’d told himself the buyout was a kindness. Watching me fight that old tractor alone for two days had made him see what he really did.
“You can have the house back,” he said. “I mean it.”
I told him no. I had a house. I had eighty acres in my own name. What I wanted was for Josie to still have her dad’s family.
Then Tyler went into the pantry and came back with a narrow strip of painted wood. He’d pried it carefully off the doorframe. It had fourteen years of Josie’s height marks on it, every one written in Wade’s blocky carpenter’s-pencil handwriting. The last one said “Jo — 14 — Christmas.”
Josie held that strip of wood against her chest and hugged Tyler so hard he nearly fell over.
Harvest on the Ostrander place
We finished planting a few days later. That evening, Josie and I stood at the end of my driveway and watched two sets of tractor lights moving through the dark. One on each side of the road.
We got rain in June and again in July. At harvest, my eighty acres made fifty-three bushels an acre. Not a record, but good for a widow who planted late on a borrowed seed tender.
Curtis brought over the family combine and cut it for me. I insisted on paying the custom rate. He insisted on not cashing the check. We’re still arguing about it.
With the grain money, I paid off the tractor and opened a savings account in Josie’s name with $5,000 in it. The land goes to her when she’s twenty-one, just like Wade wanted.
Tyler nailed that strip of wood inside my front door. On Josie’s fifteenth birthday, she stood against it in her socks, and I made a new mark with Wade’s old pencil. “Jo — 15 — Ostrander place.”
She says she’s driving the tractor next spring. I told her she needs to reach the clutch first. She stood on her tiptoes, grabbed her dad’s cap off the hook, and pulled it on. It still slips over her eyebrows. Just not quite as far.
They gave me $500,000 to disappear. I used it to stay where my daughter could see her father’s fields every single morning.
Would you have taken the house back when Curtis offered? Tell us what you think Carol should have done.