\u201cTo my son Wade,\u201d the lawyer read, \u201cthe 1994 International feed truck, with the mixer box, and its title.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stopped there. Because that was where the sentence stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I waited for the next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There wasn\u2019t a next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a Tuesday, the last week of February, in a little office above the hardware store in St. Paul, Nebraska. The radiator ticked. Somebody downstairs was cutting a key, and you could hear the grinder through the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My brother Phil sat across the table from me in a sport coat, with his reading glasses folded in his hand. He didn\u2019t look up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sentence right before mine had been his.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTo my son Phil, the home place, being the home quarter, the east eighty, and the creek pasture, with the buildings, the irrigation equipment, and the machinery.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four hundred acres. The center pivot. The house we were both raised in. The shop where I\u2019d spent twenty-two winters with my hands inside one piece of iron or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil is fifty-six. He sells insurance in Omaha. He hadn\u2019t driven a tractor in thirty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m fifty-one. I hadn\u2019t gone more than nine days in a row without driving one since I was a boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lawyer\u2019s name was Don Jensen. He was a decent man who\u2019d known my father since they were both kids in 4-H. He set the paper down on the table and squared it with two fingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWade,\u201d he said. \u201cHe came in here in November, and he was in his right mind. I want you to hear that from me. He knew exactly what he was signing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t doubt it,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t say why. I asked him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat did he say?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don rubbed his jaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018Write it the way I told you, Don.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was my father. Word for word. I could hear him saying it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My wife, Theresa, was sitting next to me. She had her hand on my knee under the table, and she\u2019d been pressing down the whole time. The way you hold a gate shut in a north wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I stood up. I shook Don\u2019s hand. I thanked him, because my mother raised us to thank people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I went down the stairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s the only time a lawyer comes into this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Outside it was twenty degrees, with a north wind, and the sky was the color of a galvanized stock tank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Theresa caught up with me at the pickup. She keeps the books for the vet clinic in town, and she doesn\u2019t say a word about anything until she\u2019s got it added up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCall a lawyer of your own, Wade,\u201d she said. \u201cNot Don. Somebody from Grand Island.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTwenty-two years. You have twenty-two years in that ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know how many years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThen why not?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had to think about how to say it. Because I hadn\u2019t said it to myself yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBecause that\u2019s his signature,\u201d I said. \u201cHe\u2019s three weeks in the ground. He can\u2019t tell me what he meant. I\u2019m not going to stand up in a courtroom and argue with a man who can\u2019t answer back. Not him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She looked at me for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then she reached up and pulled my coat collar up against the wind. That\u2019s what she does when she\u2019s lost an argument and loves me anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil came out the street door behind us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stood on the sidewalk with his glasses still in his hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWade.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I waited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI never asked him for this. I want you to know that. I didn\u2019t know a thing about it till Don called me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know you didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what he was thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t either.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He opened his mouth to say something else. I could see it was something hard. And I watched him decide not to say it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He nodded once and walked to his car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I let him go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve thought about that moment a good deal since. If either one of us had said one more sentence on that sidewalk, we\u2019d have saved ourselves four months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But we were Albert Kucera\u2019s sons, both of us. And Albert\u2019s sons did not say the extra sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I drove out to the home place that afternoon to get what was mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The truck was sitting in the north bay of the machine shed. Right where Dad backed it in on the evening of February second, after he fed the calves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He died the next night. In his recliner, with the cattle market report on the TV. I found him in the morning, when he didn\u2019t come out to the lots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the truck was parked the way he parked it. Nosed out. Wheels straight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was white once. Thirty winters had turned it to chalk. The doors still had the ghost of a seed dealer\u2019s name where a decal had peeled off years ago. It had the 466 diesel, a five-speed with a two-speed axle, and a mixer box on the back. There was a dent in the discharge chute from a morning in 2003 when Dad caught the corner of a feed bunk and said a word my mother made him apologize to the dog for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I climbed up and sat behind the wheel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His chore gloves were on the dash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yellow leather gone brown. Laid one on top of the other. And curled. Curled into exactly the shape of his hands holding a steering wheel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat there and looked at those gloves until the windshield fogged up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was a seed corn cap on the passenger side of the bench seat. A pair of fencing pliers on the floor. The cab smelled like ground corn and diesel and peppermints. He kept peppermints in his shirt pocket to hide the fact that he still chewed tobacco after the doctor told him to quit.
The truck was plugged in, so it started on the first try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I unplugged it. I coiled the cord on the hook the way he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I drove it eleven miles home at forty-five miles an hour, with the heater roaring and my father\u2019s gloves riding on the dash in front of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t move them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I haven\u2019t moved them yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Theresa and I live on seven acres on the Elba road. A house, a barn, and two lots we bought the year we got married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I parked the truck beside the barn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She came out in her coat and stood looking at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWell,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s paid for.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the only thing out there that is, probably.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I meant it as a joke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t know yet that I\u2019d just said my father\u2019s exact sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The harder part came the next morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had forty cows of my own. I\u2019d built that herd from six bred heifers Dad sold me at cost when I was twenty-nine. They\u2019d always run on his creek pasture in the summer and his cornstalks in the winter. That was the deal between us. I drew a wage. I ran my cows on his grass. And I never once asked to see the books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now it was Phil\u2019s grass. Phil\u2019s stalks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hooked up the stock trailer and started hauling my cows home. Eight at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was the middle of calving season. You do not move cows in the middle of calving unless you absolutely have to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil drove out from Omaha that Saturday and found me loading the fourth trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stood at the lot gate in a brand-new canvas coat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t have to do this. Leave them where they are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey\u2019re not yours to feed, Phil.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m not asking you to pay.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know you\u2019re not. That\u2019s the trouble with it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He put both his hands on the top rail of the gate. He has our mother\u2019s hands. Long in the fingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat are you going to do for grass?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cRent some.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWade.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ll rent some.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I latched the trailer gate and drove out past him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the mirror, he was still standing at the rail. Behind him was the house. And in the kitchen window was the yellow curtain our mother hung in 1988.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I rented a half section of hill pasture north of Elba from a widow named Mrs. Nielsen. I\u2019d helped her husband work calves for years before he passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sixty-five dollars a pair, per month, for five months. Thirteen thousand dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I shook her hand at her kitchen table. She made me take home a loaf of rye bread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYour dad was hard,\u201d she said. \u201cBut he was honest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYes ma\u2019am,\u201d I said. \u201cHe was both.\u201d
Then I drove to the co-op and asked Jeff, the manager, if he could use a man through the spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jeff has known me since Little League. He looked at me across the counter and didn\u2019t ask one single question. I\u2019ll remember him for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou still got your commercial license?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFrom when I hauled cattle for the Larsens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTwenty-three an hour. I need a tender driver for the dry spreaders, and somebody who can run the feed mill when Kim\u2019s out. You start Monday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that\u2019s how a man who\u2019d farmed four hundred acres beside his father for twenty-two years ended up hauling other men\u2019s fertilizer to other men\u2019s fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I fed my own forty cows morning and night out of the feed truck, in the lot behind our barn. Ground hay and a little distillers grain. It was way more truck than forty cows needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every morning at five-thirty, I climbed up into that cab in the dark. And the gloves were there on the dash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I said good morning to them. Like a fool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I waited for planting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I should explain that part. Because Theresa asked me about it more than once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCall him,\u201d she said, around the tenth of April. We were at supper. \u201cTell him you\u2019ll put the crop in. He\u2019d pay you. He\u2019d be glad to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe knows my number.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s pride.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSome of it is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s the rest?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I set down my fork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf I call him and offer, then I\u2019m the hired man asking for work on my own father\u2019s place. I planted that pivot twenty-two springs in a row. I\u2019m not going to beg to plant it the twenty-third. If he wants me, all he has to do is ask. One sentence. I\u2019d be in the field by dark.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She didn\u2019t say anything to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She got up and cut me a second piece of pie. That was her way of saying she thought I was wrong, and she was going to let me find it out myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ground under that pivot is a silt loam that warms up slow. Dad never put a seed in it until the soil was fifty degrees at four inches deep, at seven in the morning, three days running. He kept a soil thermometer on a nail in the shop just for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He kept everything else in a little green pocket notebook. Planter settings. Seed population. Which nozzle package was on the pivot. How the well was pumping. Which tower liked to stick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The soil hit fifty the last week of April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch Sedlacek, who farms the section just east of Dad\u2019s, had his planter rolling on the twenty-eighth. I know because I filled his dry spreader that week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He climbed down out of his tractor while I was running the auger and stood next to the tender with his thumbs hooked in his bib pockets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch is seventy-three. He and Dad shared a fence line for forty-six years. And they argued across it for all forty-six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnybody in your dad\u2019s fields?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNot that I\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou going to be?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHaven\u2019t been asked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch looked at me. He has a way of looking at you that feels like being weighed on the scale at the elevator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTwo of a kind,\u201d he said. Then he shook his head. \u201cNo. Three of a kind. Him and the both of you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He spat in the dirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a wonder anything ever got said in that house.\u201d
Then I drove to the co-op and asked Jeff, the manager, if he could use a man through the spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jeff has known me since Little League. He looked at me across the counter and didn\u2019t ask one single question. I\u2019ll remember him for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou still got your commercial license?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFrom when I hauled cattle for the Larsens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTwenty-three an hour. I need a tender driver for the dry spreaders, and somebody who can run the feed mill when Kim\u2019s out. You start Monday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that\u2019s how a man who\u2019d farmed four hundred acres beside his father for twenty-two years ended up hauling other men\u2019s fertilizer to other men\u2019s fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I fed my own forty cows morning and night out of the feed truck, in the lot behind our barn. Ground hay and a little distillers grain. It was way more truck than forty cows needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every morning at five-thirty, I climbed up into that cab in the dark. And the gloves were there on the dash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I said good morning to them. Like a fool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I waited for planting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I should explain that part. Because Theresa asked me about it more than once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCall him,\u201d she said, around the tenth of April. We were at supper. \u201cTell him you\u2019ll put the crop in. He\u2019d pay you. He\u2019d be glad to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe knows my number.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s pride.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSome of it is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s the rest?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I set down my fork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf I call him and offer, then I\u2019m the hired man asking for work on my own father\u2019s place. I planted that pivot twenty-two springs in a row. I\u2019m not going to beg to plant it the twenty-third. If he wants me, all he has to do is ask. One sentence. I\u2019d be in the field by dark.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She didn\u2019t say anything to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She got up and cut me a second piece of pie. That was her way of saying she thought I was wrong, and she was going to let me find it out myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ground under that pivot is a silt loam that warms up slow. Dad never put a seed in it until the soil was fifty degrees at four inches deep, at seven in the morning, three days running. He kept a soil thermometer on a nail in the shop just for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He kept everything else in a little green pocket notebook. Planter settings. Seed population. Which nozzle package was on the pivot. How the well was pumping. Which tower liked to stick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The soil hit fifty the last week of April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch Sedlacek, who farms the section just east of Dad\u2019s, had his planter rolling on the twenty-eighth. I know because I filled his dry spreader that week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He climbed down out of his tractor while I was running the auger and stood next to the tender with his thumbs hooked in his bib pockets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch is seventy-three. He and Dad shared a fence line for forty-six years. And they argued across it for all forty-six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnybody in your dad\u2019s fields?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNot that I\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou going to be?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHaven\u2019t been asked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch looked at me. He has a way of looking at you that feels like being weighed on the scale at the elevator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTwo of a kind,\u201d he said. Then he shook his head. \u201cNo. Three of a kind. Him and the both of you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He spat in the dirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a wonder anything ever got said in that house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wasn\u2019t there for what happened next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch told me his side of it later. And Phil told me his. The two of them matched, which is how I know it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a Thursday evening, the eleventh of June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil had driven out from Omaha after work. He\u2019d been doing that every week. Sleeping in his old bedroom. Walking fields he didn\u2019t know how to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was standing at the end rows of the pivot quarter in a pair of work boots that still had the yellow in the laces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch pulled his pickup over on the shoulder, got out, and leaned on the line fence. He didn\u2019t say hello. He just looked at that corn for most of a minute.
\u201cYour dad,\u201d he said finally, \u201cwould\u2019ve said a blind mule plants straighter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil didn\u2019t answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe\u2019d have said you could lose a hog in those skips. He\u2019d have said whoever set that planter ought to be made to eat the seed tags.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI expect he would,\u201d Phil said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat\u2019d that outfit charge you?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTwenty-eight dollars an acre. Plus seed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch let that sit there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou know what else Albert would\u2019ve said?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe\u2019d have said it\u2019s the eleventh of June, and it isn\u2019t lost yet. Corn\u2019s forgiving if you get to it. That needs sprayed by Monday. It needs nitrogen put on beside the row. And that pivot needs to be walking before the Fourth of July, or you can forget the whole business.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil looked over at the pivot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know how to start it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI had a man out to look at it. He said the panel was throwing a fault, and he could come back in two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t have two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch told me Phil took his cap off then and ran his hand back over his head. The exact way our father did when he was whipped. Butch said it gave him a turn to see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a man eleven miles from here,\u201d Butch said, \u201cwho knows which tower sticks on that machine. And what to hit it with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know there is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThen what in the world are you standing here talking to me for?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil put his cap back on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBecause I got the farm and he got a truck, Butch. How am I supposed to drive into his yard and ask him for anything?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch said he thought about that a minute. He said it was the first time in thirty years he thought Phil sounded like one of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe same way he\u2019d have to drive into yours,\u201d Butch said. \u201cSlow. With your hat in your hand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then Butch said one more thing. I\u2019ll come back to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI asked your dad twice for that east eighty. It lays right up against my ground. I\u2019d have paid him fair both times. He said his father bought it in 1961 with hog money, and he wasn\u2019t going to be the one to sell it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Butch straightened up off the fence wire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m just telling you. That offer never went anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was greasing the feed truck that evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was past eight o\u2019clock and still light out. That long June light that makes everything look better than it is. I had the grease gun on the driveline when I heard tires on gravel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was Dad\u2019s pickup. The blue three-quarter-ton with the cracked taillight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For half a second, coming up my lane with the sun behind it, it was him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phil got out slowly. His new boots were muddy to the ankles.
He walked across the yard and stopped beside the running board of the feed truck. He looked up at the cab. At the windshield. I knew he could see the gloves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then my brother took off his cap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had never in my life seen him take his cap off to ask for anything. Not for a loan. Not for a girl. Not at our mother\u2019s bedside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWade,\u201d he said. \u201cI need to ask you something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wiped my hands on a rag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cGo ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019m looking at out there.\u201d His voice was steady. But it cost him. I could hear it cost him. \u201cI know it\u2019s bad. I don\u2019t know how bad. And I don\u2019t know what to do first. Would you come look at it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four months I\u2019d waited for that sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some nights, I\u2019d planned exactly what I\u2019d say back. Most of it wasn\u2019t very Christian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But standing there, what I saw was a man in his fifties holding his cap in both hands in front of his little brother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I didn\u2019t have a single one of those speeches left in me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSaturday,\u201d I said. \u201cI work till noon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He let his breath out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ll pay you. Whatever you say.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou\u2019ll pay the co-op for the spray and the nitrogen. That\u2019ll be enough of a bill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hung the grease gun back on its nail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd Phil. I\u2019ll look at it. I\u2019m not saying anything more than that yet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s fair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhy Kansas?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He turned the cap around once in his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBecause they didn\u2019t know me,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t ask you. And everybody else around here would\u2019ve known I hadn\u2019t asked you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was an honest answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was also the exact same answer I\u2019d given Theresa back in April. Just with the words turned around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSaturday,\u201d I said again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He nodded. He looked one more time at the windshield, at the gloves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then he drove our father\u2019s pickup back down the lane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cTo my son Wade,\u201d the lawyer read, \u201cthe 1994 International feed truck, with the mixer box, and its title.\u201d He stopped there. Because that was where the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":173,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7835,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7834\/revisions\/7835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bzerbros.fun\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}