I looked at my hands. They were wind-chapped and cracked at the knuckles, hands that had held a hymnal on Saturday and a casserole dish ever since. I had not cried in front of the boy. I had not cried at the funeral. I had cried only once, on the kitchen floor with Tom’s chore coat in my lap, and I had not planned to do it again until the first snow.
Through the window, I watched Arlen cross the yard. He was seventy-eight, bowlegged, stooped at the shoulder. He got into a faded green Ford with a flatbed and a hay spike, and he did not look back at the house.
Tom and I bought the place in 1998, a hundred and sixty acres of Nebraska Sandhills grass with a house that leaned and a barn that leaned worse. We were thirty-one. We had a dog, a pickup with a cracked windshield, and eleven thousand dollars borrowed from his mother. The banker in Valentine looked at our paperwork for a long time and said, “You folks understand this is hard country.”
