Plowed by My Stepfather novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Off Duty

Gretchen's POV

At ten to six on Monday morning the elevator lot was already full of trucks, and not one of them was loaded.

Farmers stood in the gravel with thermos cups and folders of paper.

Dozens of men and women filled the lot.

Dean pulled in beside the church-kitchen woman's flatbed, and he parked, and he looked at me.

"I didn't call any of them," he said.

"I know."

"She called them all."

"I know that too."

We walked up to the office door together.

Orrin's clerk unlocked it from the inside at six o'clock sharp, and she held it open with her hip.

The office was warm and brightly lit, and it smelled of coffee that nobody had poured.

The old man in the cap went to the counter first.

He laid a sheet of paper on it and smoothed it flat with his palm.

"Delivery contract for the fall," he said. "Eleven thousand bushels. I'm ending it."

The clerk looked at the paper.

She took a stamp off the shelf and brought it down with a thump.

"Cancelled," she said.

The next farmer stepped up, and put down a paper.

Then the next.

They came up the counter one by one, in work boots, with their folders, and each one laid a paper down and said the same thing in a different voice.

The stamp fell, and fell again.

I watched the pile of cancelled contracts grow.

Orrin came out of his private office at six-fifteen in yesterday's plaid shirt, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.

He stopped in the doorway.

He looked at his own counter, and at the stack, and at the faces.

"Now, folks," he said. "Let's not do anything in a temper."

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