My Stepmother Sold the Farm, So I Married the Man Who Left novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: The Cab of the Truck

The truck stopped at the foot of the porch steps, and the engine idled.

Nels opened the passenger door from the inside and leaned across the seat.

"Get in," he said.

"She locked me out."

"I figured. Get in, Sol, before you freeze."

I climbed in.

The cab was warm and smelled of coffee, canvas and gasoline.

He turned the heater up all the way, took his coat off, and put it around my shoulders without a word.

Then he sat with both hands on the wheel and looked through the windshield at the rain.

"I drove to the end of the lane," he said. "I got to the road and I couldn't turn left."

"Where would you have gone?"

"North Dakota," Nels said.

"Oh."

"I got as far as the mailbox," Nels said.

We sat there for a long time.

The windows fogged, one by one, until the cab was a small, warm room shut off from the rest of the farm.

Rain drummed on the roof.

I should have asked him all the things that were still unanswered, and I knew it.

I was too tired, and I was also too glad he had come back to make him pay for it just then.

"Do you remember what I wrote," I asked, "in the one about the heifer?"

"The one you named Delores."

I snorted before I could stop it.

"She was a mean heifer," I said. "She kicked every vet tech in the county."

"You said she'd come to a bad end."

"She did, she was sold."

"You said that was the most Lutheran form of damnation," Nels said, and the corner of his mouth moved. "I laughed out loud on a rig floor. A man asked me what was wrong."

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