I told Luke that same evening.
I waited until the kids were asleep. Hailey was eight then, and Cody was five. They’d already had a hard winter losing their grandma. They didn’t need to hear anything bad about their grandpa.
Luke listened with both hands flat on the kitchen counter.
When I finished, he didn’t say anything for a long time.
“He said that at the co-op,” Luke said finally. “At the coffee table.”
“That’s what Merle told me.”
If you didn’t grow up out here, the co-op coffee table is a long folding table by the seed counter. There’s a coffee pot nobody ever washes and a coffee can for quarters. The same eight or ten men sit there every morning at six-thirty.
They settle the weather. The markets. The Huskers. And everybody else’s business.
Whatever gets said at that table is all over the county by noon.
And this was all over the county by now.
Luke rubbed his face with both hands.
“Amy. He just buried Mom. I’m not going to drive over there and fight him over a sentence.”
“I’m not asking you to,” I said.
“I know he’s wrong about you.” He looked at me then. “I know that. I just don’t know how to tell my dad he’s wrong right now. I don’t think he’d hear it from anybody.”
Luke isn’t a coward. And he isn’t a fool.
He was a thirty-seven-year-old man whose mother had been gone fourteen weeks. He loved his father. And he could see his father wasn’t right yet.
So I didn’t push him.
I lay awake that night next to Luke and listened to the furnace kick on and off.
And somewhere around two in the morning, I made up my mind.
Grant Ostrander was a man from Denver who wanted somewhere to shoot pheasants a few weeks out of the year.
Men like that sell.
Maybe in two years. Maybe in twenty. But someday, he’d sell.
And when he did, we were going to be standing there with the money.
And I wasn’t going to spend those years angry at Walt Brandt.
Anger is expensive. And I was going to need every dollar.
Easter that year was at Luke’s sister Karen’s house in Gibbon.
Fourteen of us. Two card tables pushed up against the end of the dining room table. Ham and scalloped potatoes. And the green Jell-O salad that nobody eats and everybody expects.
Karen had set out the glass deviled egg plate shaped like a hen. It had been June’s.
For a minute, nobody could look at it.
Then everybody did. And Cody asked if he could have the egg in the middle.
Walt sat at the head of the table, because Karen put him there. He looked smaller than he had at Christmas. His good gray church coat hung over the back of his chair.
Before Karen’s husband, Jeff, could start the prayer, I stood up.
Luke looked up at me. I hadn’t told him I was going to do this.
“Walt,” I said. “I want to thank you for something.”
The room went quiet. The way a room does when everybody in it has heard the same story.
“Thank you for giving Luke that farm to grow up on,” I said. “For teaching him to drive a tractor before he could see over the dash. For the barn, and the creek, and every Sunday dinner at that table.”
I kept my voice even.
“Whatever happens to that place, Luke had it. Our kids had it. Nobody can sell that part.”
Walt looked down at his plate.
His jaw worked once. Then again.
He nodded. One time. He didn’t say anything.
Jeff said the prayer. And we passed the ham.
In the car on the way home, with both kids asleep in the back seat, Luke asked me why I did it.
“Because I’m going to buy it back,” I said. “And I didn’t want to do it angry.”
He drove a full mile without a word.
Then he reached over and put his hand on my knee. And he left it there all the way into Kearney.
