At My Husband’s Funeral Lunch, His Brothers Handed Me a $500,000 Buyout and Told Me to Leave the Farm, So I Bought 80 Acres Across the Road

“I’ll pay what it’s worth,” I said. “Jeff would have. You know he would have.”

And for the first time since March, Randy laughed.

“He would have argued with me about the rate for an hour,” he said. “Then he’d have paid it and bought me supper.”

That’s when Abby, who hadn’t said one word, reached up and took off her dad’s green seed cap.

She set it down on the tablecloth beside her plate.

Randy looked at that cap.

He went very still.

Then he reached over and touched the brim with one finger. Gently. The way you’d touch something in a museum.

“I gave him that,” he said. And his voice broke right in half. “The year he started planting on his own. I bought it at the seed meeting in Hastings. He was sixteen. He wore it every spring for thirty years.”

“He still had it on the hook,” Abby said. “Mom almost forgot it. But Aunt Lori remembered.”

Randy picked up his napkin and pressed it against his face.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Lori got up and went to the stove and stood there with her back to all of us.

Luke reached over and put his hand on his dad’s shoulder. The same way the man behind him put a hand on his shoulder at the  funeral.

Then Randy took the napkin down from his face. He cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said. “The roast is getting cold.”

And we ate.

After dinner, Luke said he had something for Abby. He took her down the hallway to the pantry.

When they came back, he was carrying a long, narrow piece of painted wood. About six feet of door trim, white, with the old nail holes still in the ends.

It was the inside of the pantry door frame.

Every birthday since she could stand up, Jeff had stood Abby against that door frame. He’d put a book flat on top of her head and marked her height with a carpenter’s pencil. And the date.

There were twelve marks on that piece of wood.

The very last one, in Jeff’s blocky handwriting, said: “Abby, 12, last Nov.”

“I pried it off this morning,” Luke said. “Real careful. I’ll put a new piece up for me. You should have this one.”

Abby held it in both arms.

She ran her finger up the marks, one at a time. All the way from the bottom to the top. Age one. Age two. Age five, with a little drawing of a star next to it. Age twelve.

Then she set it gently against the wall.

She walked over to Luke and hugged him around the middle. Hard.

He stood there with his arms out for a second. Like he didn’t know what to do with them. Then he put them around her.

I looked over at Randy. He was watching his son with an expression I’d never seen on his face before. I think he was proud, and ashamed, and grateful. All at once. And didn’t know which one to feel first.

We finished planting the eighty on Monday.

Luke came across the road at daylight without being asked. He ran the tractor. I ran the seed tender. Abby rode in the buddy seat in her father’s cap.

Around four o’clock, Scott walked across the road with a box of donuts from the gas station in Blue Hill. He stood at the end of my field eating a long john, watching the last passes. Like a man watching a ball game.

Across the road, Randy was planting their last field on the north end himself.

We both ran late. The light was going. The sky over the Wiebe barn went orange, then pink, then purple. The meadowlarks quit singing for the night.

Luke flipped on the tractor lights.

Across the road, I saw Randy’s lights come on too.

I stood at the edge of my field with the last empty seed bag folded under my arm.

Abby climbed down out of the cab. She came and stood next to me. She leaned her head against my side.

And we watched.

On our side of the road, Luke was running the last rows, the planter lights swinging slowly around at the end of each pass. On the other side, Randy’s lights were doing the same thing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Across Jeff’s ground.

“Count the passes,” I said.

Abby reached up and held the green cap on with one hand. Even though there wasn’t any wind.

And we stood there together at dusk and watched two sets of planter lights moving back and forth, on either side of the gravel road.

It rained in July.