Chapter 6: The Truck Horn

The line of trucks outside the scale house on Friday ran back a quarter mile, past the elevator and out onto the county road.

It was the last week of the soft white run, and every grower in the valley had a load to weigh and a question to ask.

They asked it politely.

"Morning, Signe," said the grower from the Lindqvist place, leaning out of his cab.

"Seen the news?"

"I've seen it," I said, and wrote the weight.

"It's real nice, the two of you," he said.

"Thank you," I said.

"I told my wife I always knew you'd end up with something big," he called to the cab behind him.

"You said she'd end up an old maid with a cat," the driver behind him called back.

I did not laugh.

I tore the ticket and handed it through the window.

The Wheelwrights had not been in the valley three generations, and the Aldahls had been here four.

They had never once come to my scale house to be weighed.

Now they came one after another, in their trucks and their pickups and a ranch rig with a horse trailer.

They came to look at the girl who had stood up at the Whitman and told the Wheelwrights whose water it was.

Some of them winked.

Some of them said nothing at all and studied me the way you study a stranger on a scale who has come out heavier than you guessed.

At four o'clock a black Audi pulled up and parked at the side of the lot.

I saw it from the window, and I kept writing.

The last grain truck of the day went out over the deck at ten past five.

I locked the counter and turned the lamp low.

The door opened without a knock.

"We're closed," I said, without turning.

"I know," said Rhys Wheelwright.

He shut the door behind him and slid the bolt.

I put the pencil down.

"You posted the announcement," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"You told me you would not say the word engaged."

"I did not say it," he said.

"I posted it."

"Are you going to explain that?" I asked.

"Not yet," he said.

I turned around.

He stood just inside the door in his dark coat with the low light from the window across his face.