“Your father-in-law’s been talking at the co-op.”
Merle Hansen said it the second I pulled the suction out of his mouth.
He said it kindly. The way you’d tell a man his tailgate was down.
I had my scaler in my right hand and his chart open on the screen. I set the scaler down on the tray.
“Talking about what, Merle?”
He looked up at the ceiling tiles for a long while.
Merle was eighty-one. A retired corn and cattle man from out past Gibbon. He’d been sitting in my chair every six months for nine years.
And he was the kind of man who figured a woman ought to know what was being said about her in a room she could never walk into.
“Walt says he wasn’t about to sell the place to his boy,” Merle said. “Says the boy married a town girl. And she’d have it chopped up into lots by Christmas.”
The little radio on the counter was playing the gospel station out of Hastings. I remember that.
I remember the clip on his paper bib had come loose on one side. I reached over and fixed it before I said anything at all.
“Thank you for telling me, Merle,” I said.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve known you since you had braces.”
He had.
My dad ran a gas station on Second Avenue in Kearney, Nebraska, for thirty years. Half the farmers in Buffalo County filled up their pickups there and watched me do my homework on the counter next to the beef jerky.
I was a town girl. That part was true.
I grew up four blocks from the high school. Sidewalk out front. Streetlight outside my bedroom window. I didn’t know a heifer from a steer until I was nineteen years old.
I finished Merle’s cleaning. I did a good job on it too. My hands know how to keep working when the rest of me has stepped out of the room.
Then I walked him to the front desk. I wrote “six months” on his appointment card.
And then I went into the supply closet, and shut the door, and stood there in the dark between the boxes of gloves and fluoride until my face felt like my own again.
My name is Amy Brandt. I’m a dental hygienist in Kearney. I was thirty-six that spring.
And to understand why that one sentence at the co-op coffee table cut so deep, you have to understand the homeplace.
My husband, Luke, was raised on the Brandt homeplace.
Eleven miles north of Kearney on a gravel county road. A white two-story farmhouse with a covered porch. A red barn his grandfather built with his own hands. A machine shed. A row of cottonwoods for a windbreak. And eighty acres.
That ground had been in the Brandt family since 1938.
Luke’s father, Walt, farmed it his whole life. For the last ten years, he’d rented the cropland out to a neighbor and just kept a dozen cows on the pasture down by the creek.
Luke’s mother, June, died that January.
It was her heart. And it was fast.
I’ll only say this about June. She kept a jar of peppermints by the back door for the mailman. And she knew every one of her grandchildren’s shoe sizes without ever having to ask.
Walt was sixty-eight.
After the funeral, he moved through that house like a man who’d set something down and couldn’t remember where.
In February, he called Luke and said he was going to sell the place.
We drove out on a Sunday afternoon and sat down at the kitchen table. The same oilcloth-covered table where I’d eaten fifteen years of Sunday dinners.
Luke did the talking. Because it was his father. And because Luke thinks through every single sentence before he says it.
“Dad, we’d like to buy it,” Luke said. “On a contract. Payments to you. The same way Grandpa sold it to you. We’d keep it just like it is.”
Walt turned his coffee cup around on the oilcloth.
It was a brown stoneware cup with a chip on the handle. He’d drunk out of it every single morning for as long as I’d known him.
“I’ll think on it,” he said.
That was all.
He didn’t look at me once during that whole conversation. At the time, I thought it was grief.
In April, Walt called Luke at the county shop on a Tuesday morning.
Luke runs a motor grader for the Buffalo County road department. He took the call standing next to his machine with the engine still ticking.
Walt told him he’d sold the homeplace. To a man from Denver named Grant Ostrander. Two hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars. Mr. Ostrander wanted it for pheasant hunting. Closing was in May.
The whole call took less than two minutes.
Luke told me that night at supper. Then he went out to our garage and sharpened every single mower blade we owned. Including two that didn’t need it.
Two weeks after that, Merle Hansen sat down in my chair.
