By Admin 
The third concrete truck was pulling out of my lane when I turned in.
I had to ease my Buick halfway into the ditch to let him pass. The driver lifted two fingers from the steering wheel, and I lifted two in return. That was the polite thing to do.
It wasn’t until he had disappeared down the road that I began to wonder what a concrete truck was doing on my farm.
I’d spent the morning in Bedford having my eyes checked. When I got home, Brian’s truck was parked behind the barn, along with two others I didn’t recognize.
I walked back in my good shoes, past the barn lot and the old loading chute, through the gate Carl had hung in 1989. The ground was torn up from one end to the other. Three loaded concrete trucks will do that to April soil.
Then I rounded the corn crib and saw it.
A concrete slab, gray and wet, stretched across the middle of my back lot. That morning, the only things occupying that ground had been orchard grass and a killdeer.
Now my son was kneeling at the far edge with a steel trowel. Two strangers worked the middle with long-handled floats.
Nobody looked up.
“Brian.”
He raised his head. Concrete covered his arms to the elbows, and there was a streak of it in his hair. He smiled at me the way he used to smile when he finally got the lawn mower running.
“Hey, Mom. You’re back early.”
“What is this?”
“A pad.” He stood, his knees cracking. At forty-one, after twenty years spent working beneath other people’s machinery, he was no longer a young man. “Thirty by forty. Six inches thick, to support the lift. It’s for the shop.”
“What shop?”
“My shop.” He said it gently, as though I’d forgotten a conversation we’d already had. “The steel building comes in June. It’ll bolt right down to this.”
I looked at the concrete. Metal anchor bolts stood along the edges in neat rows, like teeth.
“You poured this on my back lot.”
“It’s the only flat piece of ground here that isn’t good for anything.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
He wiped his hands on his jeans, accomplishing nothing.
“Mom, come on.” His voice softened, the way people speak to someone they’re trying not to upset. “It’ll all be mine soon enough anyway.”
I want you to understand that he didn’t say it cruelly.
That was what hurt.
He said it as casually as someone remarking that rain was coming. He spoke as though we both understood the arrangement, as though my future had already been settled and all that remained was to wait for it.
I was sixty-seven years old. I had a pot roast thawing in the sink.
And my son, standing across forty feet of wet concrete, saw me as a woman who was mostly a matter of time.
“I see,” I said.
“I would’ve asked, but you’d have worried about it, and the trucks were already scheduled, and…” He raised a hand and let it fall. “It’s done now. It’s a good pad, Mom. Dad would’ve liked it.”
“Would he?”
He started to answer, then stopped when one of the men called out about the north corner.
“I’ve got to finish this while it’s wet. I’ll come up to the house later.”
He went back to work.
I stood there for another minute, smelling the chalky scent of fresh concrete. Beyond the slab, the killdeer ran along the fence, fussing over her nest.
Then I went back to the house, took the pot roast out of the sink, and put it back in the freezer.
I wasn’t cooking for anybody that night.
Brian never came up. A little after six, I watched his truck disappear down the lane with the other two following behind.
At eight, my daughter-in-law, Stacy, called.
I will say this for Stacy: she has never been one to hide behind a man. She’d worked the pharmacy counter in Paoli for eleven years and had a mind of her own.
“Evelyn,” she said, “Brian told me tonight that you didn’t know about the concrete.”
“I didn’t.”
“He told me back in February that you’d said it was fine.”
Back in February, Brian had sat at my kitchen table and mentioned that he was thinking about putting something up behind the barn someday.
I’d told him, “We’ll see.”
In our family, those words had always meant no.
“I said we’d see.”
Stacy exhaled.
“I’m not calling to make excuses for him. I’m calling because I want you to know what went into that pad before you decide what to do.”
“Go ahead.”
I could hear papers moving on her end.
Twenty-three yards of concrete at $160 a yard came to $3,680. Gravel for the base cost another $900. Rebar and lumber for the forms added $620. The two brothers from near French Lick who’d worked the power trowels had charged $800.
“Six thousand dollars,” Stacy said. “Exactly. That was his tax refund and everything left from his severance.”
I did the arithmetic with her on the back of my electric bill. She was right.
“And the building?”
“He put a thousand dollars down. The rest is on payments.”
She went quiet.
“Evelyn, he’s been fixing hay balers in our driveway since January. Our landlord sent us a letter. There’s a combine head sitting in pieces in Dale’s machine shed because Brian has nowhere covered to work on it. He isn’t sleeping much.”
I knew some of that already.
The implement dealer in Orleans had been bought out by a larger company after Christmas. Four mechanics had lost their jobs, and the company had kept the two youngest.
Brian had been the best mechanic they had.
“He should have asked me,” I said.
“He should have. I told him that tonight, and I wasn’t gentle about it.”
She hesitated.
“What he said to you about the farm. About it being his. Did he really say that?”
“He did.”
“Oh, Evelyn.”
“Good night, Stacy. Kiss Josie for me.”
After I hung up, I sat in Carl’s chair, something I rarely did.
A neighbor later asked why I hadn’t simply made Brian tear the slab out.
I thought about that for a long time.
Concrete doesn’t come back out of the ground neatly. You break it into pieces with a hammer mounted on a skid loader, haul away the rubble, and pay someone to fill the hole. When the work is finished, six thousand dollars of a young family’s money is lying in a heap behind somebody’s barn.
And Brian’s daughter’s father still has nowhere to work.
Besides, none of that would have changed what he’d said.
The concrete wasn’t the injury. I could walk around a slab.
What I couldn’t walk around was the phrase soon enough.
Because there was something else I had to admit while sitting in Carl’s chair.
Brian hadn’t invented the idea that I was finished with the farm all by himself.
Carl had died six years earlier, in October, in the barn lot. His heart gave out while the gate stood open and he held a feed bucket in his hand.
That winter, I sold the cows. I rented the tillable ground to Dale, sixty-one acres at a fair cash rent. I let the back lot grow into grass and told anyone who asked that I was too old to bother with it.
For six years, Brian had watched his mother keep one kitchen light burning on eighty acres and do very little with the land.
Was it any wonder he thought I was done?
He was wrong to say it. But I had spent years saying something similar to myself.
That night, I opened a drawer in Carl’s desk that I hadn’t touched in a long time.
Beneath the tractor manuals and a rubber-banded stack of Farm Bureau calendars lay a nursery catalog from the spring of 1987.
I knew exactly where it was. I’d put it there myself.
The corner of page fourteen was folded down. The page showed apple trees. I had circled six varieties in blue ink thirty-nine years earlier, back when I was twenty-eight, Brian was three, and I still had a head full of plans.
In the margin, in Carl’s square carpenter’s handwriting, were five words:
Back lot. When we get to it.
We never did.
There was always a reason, and the reasons were good ones. The back lot was the closest hay ground. The year we had money, we needed a baler. The year we had time, we had no money.
“We’ll get to it, Evie,” Carl would say.
And he meant it every time.
I was married to that man for forty-one years, and I don’t hold a single day of it against him.
But sitting there with the old catalog in my lap, I realized I’d spent my life waiting on two different men.
One had told me we’d get to it.
The other had told me it would all be his soon enough.
Both had been talking about the same two acres.
I slept well that night. Once I make up my mind, I generally sleep just fine.
The county extension office opened at eight the next morning. I called at eight-oh-one.
Mr. Pruitt had been Orange County’s extension agent for nineteen years. Purdue might call him an educator, but nobody around here did. He’d stood beside Carl in our hay field the summer the armyworms came through and never once made me feel foolish for not knowing what to do.
“Mrs. Baker,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to plant a garden. A big one. Sweet corn, cutting flowers, and an orchard. About two acres.”
“When are you thinking?”
“This year.”
“It’s April fourteenth.”
“I know what day it is, Mr. Pruitt.”
He laughed and said he could come Thursday.
He arrived at nine in a county pickup, carrying a soil probe, a white plastic bucket, a measuring tape three hundred feet long, and a bundle of wooden stakes.
We walked out to the back lot together. He looked at the tire ruts, then at the concrete slab, now pale gray beneath a sheet of plastic weighted down with boards.
“That’s new,” he said.
“That’s my son’s.”
“Ah.”
He waited. I said nothing more.
“Brian’s a good mechanic,” he said eventually. “He kept my dad’s old Oliver running about ten years longer than it had any right to.”
“He’s a good mechanic.”
“Where do you want the garden?”
“Here.” I pointed to the ground north, east, and south of the slab. “All the way around except the west side. He’ll need that for a truck and trailer.”
Mr. Pruitt studied me for a moment. I believe he understood more than I’d said, but the reason he’d lasted nineteen years in his job was that he knew when not to speak.
“Let’s see what you’ve got to work with,” he said.
He took fifteen soil samples from the garden ground and another fifteen from the proposed orchard, moving in a zigzag pattern to get a fair representation of the soil.
“Purdue doesn’t run these tests itself,” he explained. “I send them to a lab up north. Eighteen dollars per sample. Two samples, so thirty-six dollars.”
I agreed.
“You’ll have the results in about a week. But I can tell you something already.”
He crumbled a piece of soil between his fingers.
“This is the red-brown clay loam we get around here, with limestone not far underneath. The ground’s acidic. I’d guess the pH is around 5.8. Most of what you want to grow will do better around 6.5.”
“Can I plant anyway?”
“You can. Corn will forgive you. But lime works slowly. Put it down this fall, and it’ll be helping by the time those trees need it.”
He walked me to a patch of gray, crusted grass about twenty feet from the northeast corner of the slab.
“This is where they washed out their concrete chutes. Don’t plant anything here. Not this year, and possibly not next. The cement will damage the roots.”
“I wouldn’t have known that.”
“Most people wouldn’t.”
Then he brought out the stakes.
They were oak, three feet long, an inch wide, pointed at one end. The bundle weighed twelve or fifteen pounds and smelled like fresh-cut lumber. Mr. Pruitt had orange flagging tape in his shirt pocket and a three-pound hammer hanging from his belt.
“Where do you want the boundary, Mrs. Baker?”
“At the concrete.”
“Most people leave a strip of ground around a building. You’ll want room to mow and space for a ladder when it’s time to clean the gutters.”
“I know what most people do.”
He nodded.
“Then that’s where we’ll start.”
He set the first stake six inches from the northwest corner of Brian’s slab and drove it into the ground.
The sound took me back years. A hammer striking an oak stake makes a hollow, steady knock, like someone knocking on the door of an empty house.
Three blows, and the stake was in.
Mr. Pruitt tied a piece of orange tape to the top. It lifted in the breeze.
He measured thirty feet along one side and forty along the other, checking the corners with the tape. If the diagonal measured fifty feet, the corner was square.
Carl had laid out the machine shed the same way in 1981.
I held the tape and passed Mr. Pruitt the stakes one at a time.
By noon, orange flags marked a boundary running north, east, and south around Brian’s pad. His slab sat inside the open end of a garden that would eventually cover two acres, minus the concrete and the sixty feet of access on the west.
“Corn on the north,” Mr. Pruitt said. “That way it won’t shade the flowers. Flowers on the south, where you can see them from the house. Orchard on the east, where the ground rises. Cold air settles in low spots, and a late frost can take the blossoms.”
He was winding up the measuring tape when Brian’s truck came through the gate.
My son got out slowly, leaving the door open. He looked at the stakes and followed the orange line around the slab.
“Mr. Pruitt.”
“Brian.”
“Mom. What’s all this?”
“A garden.”
He walked over to the corner stake, the one six inches from his concrete. The orange tape fluttered against his knee.
“A garden? Right up against my pad?”
“Right up against your pad,” I said. “On my ground.”
Mr. Pruitt became very interested in his measuring tape.
“I can’t get a mower around the building. I can’t get a ladder up to the gutters. I can’t—”
He pushed back his cap.
“You’re doing this to spite me.”
“No.”
“Then what do you call it?”
“I’ve wanted an orchard here since before you could ride a bicycle. Your father always said we’d get to it. I stopped waiting on Monday night. Somebody reminded me that I might be running short on soon enough.”
The words landed. I saw them in his face, in the small tightening around his eyes before he shut everything down again.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“How did you mean it?”
He opened his mouth but had no answer.
“You’ve got the whole west side,” I said. “Sixty feet of access. Mr. Pruitt says that’s enough to turn a pickup and a twenty-foot trailer. If it isn’t, tell me, and I’ll move a stake. I’m not trying to stop your shop, Brian. I’m planting mine.”
He stood there for a while. Then he got back into his truck and backed carefully all the way to the gate, without touching a single stake.
Mr. Pruitt slung the measuring tape over his shoulder.
“For the apples,” he said, as if we’d been discussing nothing more serious than the weather, “I’d look at Enterprise and GoldRush. Both were developed at Purdue. They’re resistant to scab and bloom close enough together to pollinate each other. Add a Liberty if you can. There’s a nursery near Salem that might still have bare-root trees in cold storage. Call today.”
“I will.”
“I thought you might.”
Dale plowed the corn and flower ground for me that Saturday. When I asked what I owed him for turning an acre of old sod, he said he wanted a dozen ears of corn every week once the crop came in.
He wouldn’t accept anything else.
His wife, Kim, sent a jar of pickled beets down with him. I wasn’t sure what the beets were for, but I suspected she’d heard the story. By Sunday, the whole church had.
The trees arrived the following Thursday.
Twelve bare-root apple trees, wrapped in damp newspaper and plastic in the trunk of my Buick. Five Enterprise, five GoldRush, and two Liberty. At thirty-two dollars apiece, they cost $384.
I wrote the check myself and didn’t hesitate.
Bare-root trees don’t look like much. These looked like twelve switches cut for driving cattle, each about five feet tall, with a fistful of brown roots at one end and not a leaf on any of them.
I had the holes half dug when the school bus stopped at the end of the lane.
Josie comes to my house on Thursdays because Stacy works until seven.
She ran across the barn lot with her backpack bouncing against her shoulders. When she reached the first orange stake, she stopped as though she’d found a fence.
“Grandma, what are the flags for?”
“That’s where the garden is going.”
“And the sticks?”
“Apple trees.”
She looked at the bare branches lying in the shade, their roots tucked into a wet feed sack. Then she looked at me, checking whether I was teasing her.
She was nine years old. She had Carl’s ears and Stacy’s habit of looking at you until you told the truth.
“They’re dead,” she said.
“They’re asleep. You plant them while they’re asleep, and they wake up in the ground.”
“How long until there are apples?”
That was a question I’d been asking myself all week.
“Four years,” I said. “Maybe five.”
She counted on her fingers.
“I’ll be thirteen.”
“You will.”
“How old will you be?”
“Seventy-one.”
“That’s not that old.”
Then she picked up the spade.
I had to turn toward the fence row for a moment.
We planted all twelve trees before dark. I dug the holes, and Josie held each tree straight while I worked the soil back around the roots with my hands.
Mr. Pruitt had explained that the holes should be wide, not deep, so the roots could spread like fingers. The graft union, that little knot low on the trunk where the apple variety had been joined to the rootstock, needed to remain two or three inches above the soil.
Otherwise, the tree could lose the characteristics it was meant to have.
Josie found that interesting.
“It forgets?”
“It can turn into whatever the root was. Some old crabapple.”
“Then we won’t let it.”
She tied a piece of orange tape to each tree so we could find it in the grass. On the last tree, a Liberty at the top of the rise, she tied two ribbons.
“That one’s Grandpa’s,” she said. “So he gets some apples, too.”
She had been three when Carl died. She couldn’t possibly remember him. She knew him from the photograph on my icebox and from the way we all went quiet whenever a red Farmall tractor passed on the road.
“That one’s Grandpa’s,” I agreed.
I pressed the dirt down around the roots with the heel of my hand. I kept pressing long after the tree needed it.
When I finally straightened up, Brian’s truck was sitting at the gate, its engine turned off.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there. He was watching his daughter stand among twelve young trees with orange tape tied around her fingers.
I couldn’t read his expression from that distance, and I didn’t try.
He lifted a hand.
Josie waved with her whole arm.
He didn’t come over.
Now I’ll move through the summer quickly, because a summer takes a long time to live and not much time to tell.
I planted the first corn on May ninth, when the soil two inches down reached sixty degrees on Carl’s old thermometer. I chose Peaches and Cream and planted it in a block four rows wide rather than a single long row. Corn depends on wind for pollination, and a single row can lose too much pollen before it reaches the silks.
Two weeks later, I planted a second block. Two weeks after that, I planted Silver Queen. That way, everything wouldn’t ripen on the same Tuesday.
The cutting garden went in during the middle of May. Mostly zinnias, because they forgive a person who doesn’t know everything. I added cosmos, sunflowers along the back, and a row of gladiolus.
Glads are for funerals, which sounds gloomy until you realize somebody always needs flowers.
In June, Brian’s building arrived on a flatbed.
It was red steel with white trim. Brian and the two brothers from French Lick put it up in nine days.
I’ll admit it was a handsome building. The slab was perfectly level, and the walls stood straight and square.
It also sat inside a border of orange stakes, with corn growing knee-high along the north side and the first zinnia buds appearing to the south.
Brian never moved a stake.
I’ll give him credit for that. He set his ladder with its feet on the very edge of his concrete when he hung the gutters, and he didn’t complain.
Neither did I.
July brought visitors.
Mr. Pruitt came first, bringing four girls from the 4-H garden club to learn how to cut zinnias so they would last. The secret, he explained, was to cut them early, while the dew was still on the flowers, and put them straight into water.
The girls returned every Tuesday. They filled buckets with flowers and delivered them to the nursing home on the west side of town.
One of the aides told me that a man who hadn’t spoken since Easter held a sunflower in his lap all afternoon.
Then the church began visiting.
Word spread that the corn was tasseling, and people started driving out simply to see what I’d planted. Donna from the choir brought her ninety-year-old mother, who’d grown up four miles away.
The old woman stood at the edge of the orchard and looked across the ground.
“Somebody finally planted trees on the Baker back lot,” she said, as though she’d been waiting for it herself.
Every car came down my lane, past the barn, through Carl’s gate, and parked on the sixty feet of gravel in front of Brian’s shop.
By then, his business was open. He had a hand-painted sign at the road, a baler in one bay, and the combine head in the other. Farmers began arriving most mornings before seven.
I hadn’t planted the garden to embarrass my son. But I wasn’t blind, either.
Every customer who climbed down from a truck had to walk past a quarter acre of flowers to reach the shop.
And nearly every one of them said something similar.
“Your mother has this place looking beautiful.”
“I didn’t know Evelyn was still farming.”
I heard Brian answer one of those comments myself.
I was on my knees among the gladiolus when a man from Hardinsburg stopped near the shop.
“Nice place you’ve got here, Brian. Is this your property?”
There was a pause.
I kept my head down.
“It’s my mother’s,” Brian said. “I’m just on it.”
I pulled weeds very carefully for the next few minutes.
The Peaches and Cream corn ripened on the last day of July.
You peel back the husk and press a thumbnail into a kernel. If the juice runs milky, the ear is ready.
Mine ran milky.
The week before, Brian had installed two strands of electric wire around the corn patch, one six inches off the ground and the other twelve. He said raccoons would strip the whole crop the night before harvest if I didn’t protect it.
He brought over a charger and connected it to the shop.
That was his idea, not mine.
I set a folding table at the end of the lane with a handwritten sign and Carl’s old coffee can. People could take a dozen ears of corn and leave whatever they wished for the food pantry.
Within two days, the can held $212, and the table was empty.
On Sunday, August second, I invited Brian, Stacy, and Josie to supper.
Nobody else.
Some meals need a small table.
I made the pot roast I’d put back in the freezer in April, along with green beans cooked with bacon, sliced tomatoes, and two dozen ears of corn picked less than an hour before supper.
In the center of the table stood a quart jar of zinnias Josie had arranged herself, from the shortest stems to the tallest.
We bowed our heads, and Brian said grace, using the same words his father had always used.
His voice was steady.
For a while, we ate quietly. Corn has a way of making conversation difficult. Josie got butter on both ears, and nobody minded.
Then she set down her cob, wiped her hands on her shorts, and looked at her father.
“Daddy, whose farm is this?”
Stacy stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth.
“Why do you ask, honey?” Brian said.
“Emma at 4-H says it’s Grandma’s farm. But the man with the green tractor said you had a nice place. They can’t both be right.”
She looked from him to me, waiting for an answer.
Nobody had put her up to it. I would sooner have cut off my own hand than use a child to settle a quarrel.
She simply wanted the facts to make sense.
Brian set down his corn and lined it up with the edge of his plate, the way he lined up his wrenches.
I wanted to rescue him. Every instinct in me wanted to say that the farm belonged to all of us, that family was more important than ownership, that she should finish her supper.
But I kept my hands in my lap.
He was her father. He needed to answer her himself.
Brian looked at Josie.
“It’s Grandma’s,” he said. “All eighty acres. It belonged to her and Grandpa together, and since he died, it belongs to her. Every fence post.”
“Then why is your shop here?”
“Because I built it without asking her.”
Josie’s eyes widened.
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t.”
He turned toward me. Even from across the table, I could see how much effort it took.
“And I said something to your grandma the day I poured the concrete that I’ve been ashamed of ever since. I told her it would all be mine soon enough.”
“What does that mean?” Josie asked.
Brian took a breath.
“It means I talked as though I was waiting for her to be gone.”
His voice roughened, and he stopped to collect himself.
“Mom, I’m not waiting for anything. I lost my job. I was scared. I had a letter from the landlord and nowhere to put a combine I was supposed to repair. I convinced myself you were finished with the farm because then I wouldn’t have to ask you for anything.”
He stared down at his plate.
“If I asked, you might have said no. And I didn’t know what I’d do if you did.”
The room was so quiet we could hear the refrigerator running.
“I wasn’t finished with it,” I said.
“I know that now. I walk through two acres of proof every morning.”
Stacy let out a small, wet laugh. I found myself laughing, too.
“Truthfully,” I said, “I was getting close to finished. I’d been telling myself that for six years. You weren’t entirely wrong about that part. What you were wrong about was who got to decide.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you could have asked me. I would have worried about it. Then I would have said yes.”
Brian rested his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands.
For a moment, he looked like the boy who used to sit on the back porch after breaking something he couldn’t afford to replace.
When he looked up, he said, “Dad told me I could build back there.”
That surprised me.
“The summer before he died, we were fixing the gate. He told me that when I got tired of working for other people, I should put my shop on the back lot. He said it was the only flat piece of ground that wasn’t worth farming.”
He paused.
“I’ve carried that around for six years, Mom. I thought it was settled. I thought the land was mine to use.”
I sat quietly for a moment.
Then I got up, went to Carl’s desk, and returned with the nursery catalog from 1987.
I opened it to page fourteen and laid it beside Brian’s plate.
He read the note in the margin.
Back lot. When we get to it.
“That’s Dad’s handwriting.”
“Yes.”
“He promised it to you.”
“He promised it to both of us,” I said. “That was your father’s way. He couldn’t tell anyone he loved them no. He’d have promised that back lot to four different people and then stood out there scratching his head, wondering where to put everybody.”
Brian laughed.
Then his laughter broke, and he pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes.
Josie climbed down from her chair, walked around the table, and leaned against his arm.
She didn’t say anything.
Sometimes silence is the kindest thing a person can offer.
When we had all settled again, I said, “Well, it turns out there was room after all.”
It was Brian who brought up the rent, and I want that understood.
“I ought to pay you for the ground,” he said. “I should have been paying you from the beginning. I can’t afford much yet. The building payment is three hundred a month, and I’m only just getting started.”
“A dollar,” I said.
“Mom.”
“One dollar a month, and one day’s work. The first Saturday of every month. Seven o’clock in the morning. My list, not yours.”
“That isn’t rent. That’s charity.”
“It isn’t. Have you seen my list?”
Stacy laughed aloud.
“You’ll earn it,” I told him. “I need a deer fence around those twelve apple trees before the bucks start rubbing their antlers on them in September. Four tons of lime need spreading in October. The gate your father hung in 1989 is dragging again.”
I looked straight at him.
“And on the first Saturday of every month, you’ll bring me a dollar bill and hand it to me in person. That way, neither of us forgets whose farm you’re on—or that you’re welcome here.”
He studied me for a long moment.
Then he stood and reached across the pot roast.
We shook hands.
His hand was twice the size of mine now, rough and hard as a hoof. A scar crossed his thumb from the first lawn mower engine he ever took apart, on my back porch, when he was eleven.
“Josie’s the witness,” Stacy said.
“I’m the witness,” Josie announced solemnly.
Then she asked, “What’s a witness?”
“It means you saw what happened,” I told her, “and you’ll remember.”
Brian opened his wallet. He had a five-dollar bill and a few ones. He placed a dollar beside my plate and smoothed it flat.
“August,” he said.
I got up and dropped it into Carl’s old coffee can on the windowsill. It was the same can I’d used for the corn money. The $212 had gone to the food pantry the day before.
A dollar bill makes no sound when it falls into an empty coffee can.
I heard it anyway.
Then I cut the pie.
Brian arrived at my door at ten minutes to seven on the first Saturday of September.
We built the deer fence together. Five-foot woven wire, supported by steel posts, a circle around every tree. He drove the posts while I held the wire. We worked until four in the afternoon.
At breakfast, I had told him I was moving the garden boundary four feet away from the shop on all three sides. That would give him enough room to mow and set up his ladder without squeezing along the edge of his concrete.
Around noon, without my asking, he walked the boundary, pulled up my stakes, and drove them into the ground four feet farther out.
He tied the orange tape back onto every one himself.
“Most folks leave a strip,” I said.
“That’s what I hear.”
In October, we spread the lime, two tons to the acre, following Mr. Pruitt’s instructions.
In November, Brian rehung the gate.
Every month, a dollar bill appeared on my kitchen table on the first Saturday. Every month, I put it in the coffee can.
There were four bills in there by the time winter arrived.
I still didn’t know what I was saving them for.
Josie said apples.
The trees went into winter with mulch around their roots and white plastic guards on their trunks to protect them from rabbits.
Twelve thin trees stood inside twelve wire cages. They still didn’t look like much.
On the last warm afternoon before Thanksgiving, I walked out to the orchard while the low sun painted the corn stubble red.
I stopped beside the Liberty on the rise, the one with two orange ribbons.
There were buds along the stem, small and brown as grains of wheat. They were tight against the branches, already formed and waiting for spring.
I stood there a long time.
I’ve decided that some kinds of waiting are perfectly all right. It depends on who asks you to wait, and whether you’ve chosen to do it.
Behind me, an air wrench rattled inside the shop. A radio played, and over the noise I could hear my son whistling off-key.
Just the way his father used to.
I’ll be seventy-one when those trees bear fruit.
Josie says that isn’t very old.
I intend to be standing right there.