Ron stepped over to the wall telephone by the refrigerator. I listened to him say, “Dale, it’s Ron. I owe you a sincere apology, and my mother wants a word with you. No… actually, the other way around. You were dead right.”
Dale pulled his truck into the drive ten minutes later. He came around to the mudroom door, wearing his heavy canvas jacket, holding his grease-stained cap against his chest until Mama scolded him for letting the cold draft into the kitchen.
“Hazel,” he began quietly. “I told Ron that offer was awful low.”
“I know what you said. Pull up a chair and take a piece of pie.”
He sat down at Daddy’s end, and Paul shifted his chair to give him elbow room. Mama laid out the terms herself: twenty-two acres of grass, seventy-five dollars an acre, a twelve-month lease, and the kitchen window shade.
“Seventy-five is more than fair,” Dale agreed, a grin spreading across his face as he looked at his plate. “And I’ll keep the snow pushed out of your lane with the tractor blade. That’s no favor, I have to get my spreader through anyway. And I’ll bring your mail up to the porch box whenever there’s sleet on the gravel. Only when it’s freezing, mind you.”
Mama weighed that offer carefully.
“Only when there’s ice,” she agreed.
“And Hazel.” Dale laid his fork beside the crust. “If the season ever comes where you decide you want to let the deed go.”
“You’ll hear it directly from my mouth, right at this table, before a single soul in town knows. At a price where both of us can sleep easy at night.”
Dale reached his rough hand across the dishes, and Mama took it in a firm grip. That is how business has been done on these ridges for over a century, and watching it happen made me realize just how much of that old world I had been missing.
Kevin wrote down every single detail. He marked himself down for Thursday check-ins on his commute home from the dealership, since he drives right past the turnoff. Paul and I kept our Sunday dinners, and I promised to stop in Wednesdays after the school cafeteria shut down at two.
When Kevin reached the bottom margin of the tax paper, Mama raised her hand. “One more thing.”
“Number nine,” Kevin said, holding his pencil ready.
“Ask me.”
He stopped and looked up.
“Put it right there on the line. ‘Ask Mama.’ Whatever happens tomorrow, or next month, you ask me first. And come April, we’ll gather right here at this table and review every single item. If I’ve taken two more tumbles by spring and can’t recall what day it is, you ask me anyway, and then you do what needs doing. But you will ask.”
Kevin set his pencil down and printed the letters large and square, underlining them twice just like he had underlined that eighty-five thousand earlier. He slid the sheet over to Mama. She traced down every line with the tip of her finger. Then she took the pencil and signed her full name at the bottom in her careful cursive, just the way she signs her checks, before handing it over to Ron.
“That gets pinned to my refrigerator,” she instructed him. “Not stuck in a drawer in La Crosse.”
“Yes, Mama,” Ron answered softly.
Dale finished his coffee and headed back out to tend his stock. Paul grabbed his wooden folding rule from his truck cab, and through the glass I watched him kneeling by the back porch steps, with Ron holding the metal end of the rule and following directions without a peep.
I took to washing dishes while Mama sat on the wooden stool drying them with a flour-sack towel. She dried that heavy yellow potato bowl last, tracing her thumb along the chipped glaze on the rim.
“Nineteen seventy-seven,” she murmured with a faint smile.
“You sent me straight to my room without dessert.”
“I certainly did. And your father snuck up the back stairs twenty minutes later with a bowl of vanilla ice cream thinking I didn’t hear the floorboards creak.”
A laugh slipped out of me, and then the tears came again, right there with my forearms deep in soapy dishwater.
Mama let me have my cry. She didn’t offer advice or tell me what to think. She simply handed me a clean dry towel when I pulled the plug on the sink.
Once the counter was wiped clean, she pushed herself up from the stool, leaned on her cane, and walked into the dining room. I followed behind to see if she wanted the runner folded. She was standing at the far end of the long table, resting her fingers on the high back of Daddy’s oak chair. The place setting sat right before it. Clean, empty, and waiting.
“Kevin was wondering what it would bring at auction,” she said softly.
“He didn’t mean anything ugly by it, Mama.”
“I know he didn’t.” Her hand glided along the smooth armrest, coming to rest on the pale, worn patches where Harold’s hands used to sit. “None of you ever asked why I keep laying out his plate.”
“No,” I whispered, swallowing hard. “We never did. Why do you, Mama?”
It was the second honest question I had asked her all afternoon, and it meant more than the first.
“Because he asked me,” she said, her voice dropping into a quiet reverie. “For sixty-three years, Cheryl, that man never traded a heifer, never bought a combine, and never borrowed a nickel from the bank without walking through the screen door, sitting right in this chair, and asking, ‘Hazel, what’s your thinking on it?’ Half the time I gave him my mind and he went right ahead and did the opposite anyway. But he asked. Every single time. He made me feel like my say-so counted for something.” She patted the oak wood gently. “I keep the plate set so I never forget what that felt like. And I come in here every night before I turn out the lamps, lay my hand right on this wood, tell him goodnight, and tell him how my day went. Nobody else was bothering to ask.”
I stepped up beside her and put my arm around her frail shoulders. She felt so tiny against me now, barely reaching my shoulder.
“You asked me today the way Harold used to ask,” she murmured, resting her temple against my arm for a fleeting second before drawing herself back up. “In front of everybody. And then you had the decency to hush and wait for an answer. Harold always waited.” She let out a soft breath. “I was beginning to think nobody would ever ask again.”
“I’m sorry it took me so long to see it, Mama.”
“Oh, hush. You’re fifty-seven years old. You’ve got plenty of time to learn.”
Ron stepped in through the back doorway in his stocking feet, pausing when he saw the two of us standing together. His eyes fell on Daddy’s captain’s chair, the empty plate, and Mama’s hand resting against the worn wood. I could see the understanding settling into his eyes without anyone having to explain a thing.
“Mama,” he said quietly, his voice hesitant. “Next Sunday dinner… would you mind if I took that chair?”
She studied his face for a long, quiet moment.
“No, Ronald,” she answered gently. “Not quite yet. You pull your chair up right beside mine instead.” Then a soft smile broke across her wrinkled face—the first true smile I had seen since the frost in March. “But I’m thankful you asked. That makes two of you in one day.”
Ron drove straight to the post office early Monday morning. Nine days later, Mama walked down the gravel drive with her wooden cane under a bright blue sky and opened her own tin mailbox. Inside was the weekly county paper, the electric slip, and a thick brown envelope from Ron packed with every letter and card he had salvaged from his kitchen counter, Marion’s daughter’s wedding announcement resting right on top.
Come mid-January, the new seed catalog arrived in the mail. Mama walked down to fetch it herself, stepping carefully along the packed snow path Dale had cleared with his tractor blade. She told me later that she stood beneath Harold’s three tall pines for a long time, holding the colorful book tight under her arm.
She called my kitchen that evening after supper.
“Cheryl, I’m looking at this catalog and thinking about putting in more green beans than an eighty-six-year-old woman has any business tending. Two long rows, maybe three. What’s your thinking on it?”
I opened my mouth to tell her two was plenty. Then I caught myself, smiled, and closed it.
“What do you want to do, Mama?”
I could hear the warmth in her voice clear across the telephone line.
“Three full rows,” my mother said.