Plowed by My Stepfather novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Everything He Had to Say

Dean's POV

Orrin's truck came up the lane at six on Sunday evening, slowly.

I was sitting on the porch step with a cup of coffee.

Gretchen was in town with Birdie, because I had asked her to be.

She hadn't liked it.

He parked by the barn and got out without the seed cap.

He looked older without it, with thin silver hair stuck to his scalp and the pink gone out of his face.

He had no pie.

"Dean," he said.

"Orrin."

"May I sit?"

I looked at the step beside me.

He lowered himself onto it with a grunt and put his hands between his knees.

For a while neither of us said anything.

A flock of starlings went over the cornfield, loud and low.

"I buried my wife a long time ago," Orrin said. "I'd never say a word against a man who loved a woman and lost her."

"Then don't."

"I'm not. I came to tell you the truth, because you earned it at the Grange."

"Go on."

"I sold a hundred thousand bushels forward last spring. At a price I can't fill."

"The bank calls my line in December unless I put up ground. Good ground. The Hoffman bottoms."

I turned my head.

"That's why the offer," I said. "That's why the notes."

"That's why all of it. I'm not a cruel man, Dean. I was a frightened one."

"You called forty notes in July."

"I did."

"Somebody phoned the sheriff on a prepaid phone at four in the morning and said she was being held."

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