Plowed by My Stepfather novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At her mother's memorial lunch, Gretchen's fiancé announces to the county that she is selling the farm. She takes the microphone, gives back the ring and leaves with her stepfather, who tells her not to say that in that voice.
Kent stood up at the church hall microphone to say a few words about my mother, and I was grateful, because I couldn't have done it.
I was holding a paper plate of ham and scalloped potatoes.
It was the memorial lunch for my mother, three months to the day after we buried her.
Kent had planned all of it. The photo board, the coffee urns, the lilies on every table.
He had done it so kindly that I had let him.
Ten minutes earlier my phone had buzzed on the tablecloth.
Kent had reached over, silenced it and turned it face down.
He did that every time it rang.
"You're off duty, babe," he'd said, and kissed my temple.
Now he tapped the microphone and smiled at the room.
"Most of you know Brenda wanted Gretchen to have a good life," he said. "Last night Gretchen and I talked it through, and she's decided the Hoffman land should go to my dad."
That was how I found out I had agreed to sell my mother's farm, in front of eighty people.
Someone near the front said, "Oh, honey."
"Lindqvist Grain will give her a fair price," Kent went on. "We're getting married in October, in Des Moines, and Gretchen can finally stop carrying all this."
Orrin Lindqvist, at the next table, put down his fork and started to clap.
He was a big, soft-faced man who had brought a pie to my mother's funeral and another to the hospital before it.
Other people clapped with him.
I had not agreed to anything.
Last night, in Kent's car, I had said I would think about it.
He had said, "Take all the time you need."
"And Dean," Kent added, turning toward the back of the hall, "Dad's got a spot for you at the elevator. Nobody's putting you out."
I looked where he was looking.
Dean DeJong stood by the coffee urns in the one suit jacket he owned, too tight across his shoulders.
He was forty-four, my stepfather, and he had worked my mother's land for four years before he married her.
He had called me the night she died, and I had reached the hospice forty minutes too late.
We had not said ten words to each other since the funeral.
Dean did not move.
A few heads turned to him with their faces already sorry.
He just looked at me across the room.
Not asking for anything.
So I stood up.
My chair scraped the linoleum, and the clapping thinned out and stopped.
I walked to the front and held out my hand.
Kent gave me the microphone, still smiling, and put his other hand on my back.
"Babe, you're tired," he said, low. "It's been a long day."
I stepped out from under his hand.
"I didn't say yes last night," I told the hall. "I said I'd think about it. I've thought."
My voice sounded steady through the speakers, which surprised me.
"I'm not selling my mother's farm. Not to Lindqvist Grain, not to anyone."
Nobody moved.
"And Dean isn't getting a spot at anybody's elevator. He's run that land for nine years. He's staying."
I held the microphone out to Kent and he did not take it, so I set it on the podium.
Then I worked the ring off my finger.
It came off hard. I had worn it nine months and my knuckle had gotten used to it.
I took Kent's hand and put the ring in his palm and closed his fingers over it.
"You're grieving," he said, gently, so that the whole room would hear gently. "We'll talk when you're yourself."
"I am myself," I said. "This is what it looks like."
Orrin had stopped clapping.
He was watching me with his kind red face and no expression at all.
I walked down the middle aisle between the tables with eighty people watching.
My plate was still in my other hand, I realized.
I put it down on someone's table and kept walking.
At the door, Dean was already there, holding it open.
He put his hand flat against my back as I passed, to steer me through, and I felt its heat through my shirt all the way across the parking lot.
My car was boxed in by the caterer's van.
My bag was in Kent's trunk.
"I can't get to Des Moines tonight," I said.
"You're not going to Des Moines." Dean opened the passenger door of his truck. "Your room's made up."
I got in.
The cab smelled like diesel and the cheap bar soap he had always used.
He drove four miles of gravel road without a word, one wrist draped over the wheel, the scar across his left knuckles pale in the late light.
I watched his hand and thought about nothing I could say out loud.
"I'm sorry about the hall," I said finally.
"Don't be."
"They're going to talk about this for a year."
"They'll talk about the ring. They won't talk about you."
I looked at my bare left hand.
"I don't have anywhere else to go tonight," I said. "So you'd better get used to me being in that house."
It came out low and rough, and not at all how I meant it.
His hands tightened on the wheel until the knuckles went white.
"Don't say that to me again, Gretchen," Dean said. "Not in that voice."
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