Ten to Eight
Milo called at ten to eight on a Thursday morning in early November. I was standing at the kitchen sink in my robe with my second cup of coffee, looking out the window at the frost on the yard and thinking about how many potatoes I’d need to peel for the playoff supper the next day. When the phone rang and I saw my brother-in-law’s name on the screen, I smiled. I figured he was calling to tell me the hog was ready.
“Morning, Milo,” I said. “Is he dressed out?”
There was a long pause on the line, and I heard him breathe in like a man about to jump off a high dive. “I sold the hog, Bernice,” he said.
I set my coffee cup down on the counter very carefully. “You what?”
A man with a trailer had come at six, he said. From over by Iowa Falls. Cash, he said. Four hundred and eighty dollars. The man loaded the hog and drove off, and that was that. Gone.
“Milo,” I said. “That hog was for the boys. For the supper. Tomorrow.”
“I know it, Bernice,” he said, and his voice cracked a little. “I know. I’m sorry. Something came up. I’ll make it right.” And then, before I could say anything else, he hung up.
I did not scream at him. I stood there at my kitchen sink with the phone in my hand and the frost melting on the window, and I wanted to scream so bad my jaw hurt. But I didn’t call him back.
Milo is Lavern’s only brother. He’s fifty-one, three years older than Lavern, a big, loud, good-natured man who raises a few hogs and farms a hundred and sixty acres of his late father’s ground on the north side of Rapids Bend, Iowa. He’s never been married. He lives alone in the old farmhouse where he and Lavern grew up, and he eats Sunday dinner at our table most weeks, and he’s the kind of uncle who taught our son to drive a stick shift at eleven and to cuss at thirteen.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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