“Quit fussing, Donna.”
That was all he said. He said it to his pie.
It was Sunday dinner, the first week of June, and my brother Vince was at my table the way he had been at my table most Sundays since his wife, Pam, started working weekends at the nursing home. I had made a chuck roast with carrots and the rhubarb pie he likes, and I had waited until the pie on purpose, because Vince is easier to talk to with a fork in his hand.
“Vince,” I had said, “could you move the hay wagon? I’d like to get the car inside before hail season.”
He cut the point off his slice and ate it.
“Quit fussing, Donna. There’s plenty of room in that shed.”
“There is,” I said. “It’s all behind your wagon.”
“I’ll get to it.”
“You said that at Easter.”
He looked up then, and he was not angry. That is the part I want to be fair about. He looked at me the way you look at a sister who has asked you three times whether you locked the car. Fond. A little tired.
“It’s a wagon,” he said. “It isn’t hurting anything. You’ve got forty acres of yard to park in.”
Then he asked if there was any more coffee, and there was, and I poured it.
My husband, Len, built that machine shed in the summer of 1998. Sixty feet wide, a hundred and twenty feet long, sixteen foot sidewalls, with a sliding door thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high on each end so he could drive a combine in the north end and out the south without ever having to back up. He was proud of that. He hated backing a combine.
We are eleven miles northeast of Pierre, up on the flat above the river breaks, on the quarter Len’s dad homesteaded his second try. The shed sits north of the house with a shelterbelt of cedar and Chinese elm behind it, and when the wind comes across from the Missouri it sings in the door tracks.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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