Plowed by My Stepfather novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Bunkhouse

The first morning home, Orrin Lindqvist brings pie and an offer, and Gretchen finds a $212,000 note due June 1 that Dean knew about.

I woke at five-thirty in my old bed to a diesel engine turning over in the yard.

Dean had made the bed up with my high school quilt, the blue one with the ripped corner.

He had put a glass of water on the nightstand and a clean towel at the foot of it.

I lay there looking at the ceiling I had looked at for eighteen years.

Then I got up and put on yesterday's dress, because my bag was still in Kent's trunk.

The kitchen smelled of coffee. One mug sat on the counter beside the pot, and another hung on the hook above it, my mother's, with the chip in the handle.

I did not touch that one.

Outside, the sun was barely up. The planter sat in the open door of the machine shed with its seed boxes uncovered.

Dean was flat on his back underneath it with a grease gun.

"You're up early," he said, without coming out.

"Where did you sleep?"

"Bunkhouse."

I looked across the yard at the little cabin where the hired men used to sleep, forty yards from the house.

There was a pair of work boots on its step and a coffee can of cigarette ends I knew were years old.

"You've been out there since the funeral?"

"It's not my house."

"You were married to her for five years."

"It's still not my house, Gretchen."

He slid out from under the planter and stood up, and the grease gun slipped.

The zerk fitting caught the heel of his hand on the way down and opened it across the palm.

"Dean."

"It's nothing."

"It's bleeding on the planter."

I walked him to the shed sink and ran the water over it myself, because he wasn't going to.

His hand was huge in mine, warm and rough, with the pale scar I'd been looking at in the truck.

I wrapped it in a clean shop rag and held the end tight with both hands.

His forearm lay along mine, thick and corded under the sleeve, and neither of us moved for a long while.

When I glanced up, he was looking at my mouth.

Then he reached out with his good hand, picked up the toolbox from the bench, and held it in front of his belt buckle.

He had lost blood, I told myself. That was all.

"Your hand needs a stitch," I said.

"It needs a rag."

A truck came up the lane behind us. I knew the engine before I saw the grille.

Orrin Lindqvist climbed out with a pie in a dish and an armful of red roses wrapped in florist's paper.

"Gretchen, honey." He set everything on the tailgate and opened his arms.

I let him hug me. I couldn't think of a way not to.

"I won't stay," he said. "These are from Kent. He's mortified about yesterday, and so am I. We should have asked you first. That's on us."

"I told you no, Orrin."

"You did, and I heard it. Rhubarb." He tapped the dish. "Brenda's recipe. She gave it to me herself in 1998."

He looked past me at Dean's hand and the red rag.

"Dean, you need that stitched. I'll run you to town."

"I'm fine," Dean said.

"Suit yourself." Orrin turned back to me, kind as ever. "The offer's five point one million. It'll still be five point one next month. Nobody's rushing you."

"I'm not selling."

"Brenda and I went back forty years," he said. "She wouldn't have wanted you carrying this by yourself."

He glanced toward the farmhouse, at the window of the front room where my mother kept her desk.

"You'll want to go through her papers. When you're ready."

Then he got in the truck and drove away, waving.

I stood there holding the roses.

Dean said nothing, and his face didn't tell me anything either.

I put the roses in the barrel by the shed and went into the house.

My mother's desk was a rolltop, and the top stuck the way it always had.

Inside, filed under L, was a folder of bank paper with a Lindqvist Ag Credit letterhead.

I read the first page standing up.

Then I sat down in her chair.

An operating note, two years old, signed by my mother in her round hand, for two hundred and twelve thousand dollars.

Due in full on the first of June.

"Dean."

He was in the doorway. I hadn't heard him cross the porch.

He had taken off his boots, and he stood there in his socks with the wrapped hand against his chest.

He was not surprised.

"You knew about this."

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Since she signed it." He met my eyes. "She made me promise not to tell you."

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