Part 4

They used to stop at Grandma’s on the bus ride home twice a week. She’d give them cookies and let them help with the cows. That fall, they stopped. When the bus went past her lane, Caleb would look out the window at the empty stand.

Dean noticed. I could tell. She stopped asking where they’d been.

The coffee can stayed on the windowsill.

Eleven hundred and twenty dollars. The money from July. Caleb didn’t buy the compound bow. Hannah didn’t sign up for softball camp.

“We should save it,” Caleb said in October, when I asked about the bow. “In case.”

“In case of what?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“In case somebody takes it,” he said.

That broke my heart more than anything Dean had said on the porch.

My twelve-year-old son, afraid to spend his own money. Because someone he trusted had taken it once.

Part Eight: The Question Then, in February, Caleb asked a question at supper.

It was a Tuesday. Snowing outside. We were eating chili and cornbread at the kitchen table. Hannah was telling a long story about a girl in her class who’d brought a ferret to school.

Caleb wasn’t listening. He was staring at his chili.

Then he looked up.

“Dad,” he said. “Could we grow our own?”

The table went quiet.

Hannah stopped talking about the ferret.

Jeff put his fork down. Slowly.

“Grow our own what?” he asked. But he knew. We both knew.

“Sweet corn,” Caleb said. “Our own corn. In our own field. So nobody can say it’s theirs.”

Jeff looked at him for a long time.

Then he looked out the kitchen window. Out at the snow. Past the swing set and the woodpile and the machine shed.

“We’ve got the half acre behind the shed,” he said slowly.

The half acre behind the shed was where the old garden used to be. Back when the previous owners lived here. It had been grass for ten years. We mowed it in the summer and parked the boat trailer on it in the winter.

“It’d need to be plowed,” Jeff said. “And worked. Probably limed. The soil’s been sitting a long time.”

“I can do that,” Caleb said.

“You’d need seed,” Jeff said. “And fertilizer. And a way to water it in a dry spell.”

“We’ve got eleven hundred and twenty dollars,” Hannah said.

Jeff looked at his daughter. At her serious, freckled face.

“And then you’d need somewhere to sell it,” he said. “We’re on a gravel road. Nobody drives past here but the mail lady and the milk truck.”

Caleb thought about that.

“We’ve got a truck,” he said.

Jeff smiled. A slow smile. The first real one I’d seen on him since August.

“And we’ve got a truck,” he said.

Part Nine: Planting We planted the last week of April.

Jeff borrowed a garden tiller from a buddy at the dealership. He and Caleb worked up the half acre on a Saturday in March, turning over ten years of grass and thatch. They spread lime and composted manure from a neighbor’s dairy barn. They tilled it again.

By April, the soil was dark and loose and smelled like spring.

Caleb did the research.

He went to the library in New Bremen and checked out four books on growing sweet corn. He read them all. He took notes in a spiral notebook. He drew a map of the half acre on graph paper, with every row marked and labeled.

He calculated how many seeds they’d need. How far apart to plant them. How many ears they could expect from a half acre if everything went right.

“Maybe three hundred dozen,” he said. “If we get rain.”

They bought their own seed.

Caleb and Hannah went with Jeff to Hartley Feed and Seed in New Bremen. The same feed store whose pink receipt had been sitting on Dean’s kitchen counter.

Old Mr. Hartley was behind the counter. He’s eighty-one. He’s run that store since 1968. He knows every farmer in four counties.

He looked at the kids. At the coffee can Hannah was carrying.

“What are you two buying?” he asked.

“Sweet corn seed,” Caleb said. “Peaches and Cream. And Silver Queen for late season.”

Mr. Hartley looked at the coffee can. He looked at Jeff.

He didn’t say anything for a long moment.

Then he went into the back room and came out with two bags of seed.

“That’ll be sixty-two dollars,” he said.

Hannah counted it out of the coffee can. Carefully. A twenty, two twenties, two ones.

Mr. Hartley wrote out a receipt. Pink. Carbon copy.

He handed it to Hannah.

Hartley Feed and Seed. Customer: Caleb & Hannah Lund. Paid in full. $62.00.

“Your grandma’s been buying her seed here for forty years,” Mr. Hartley said quietly.