“Yes, sir,” Tom said.
“You understand it doesn’t care whether you’re nice.”
“We’re counting on that,” Tom said, and the banker laughed, and signed.
We were not rich. We never were. We ran a small cow herd, forty pair at our best, and put up our own hay on the north eighty and the creek bottom, and we sold calves in October and paid the bills in November and held our breath through January. Tom worked off the place, too, hauling for the co-op in winter. I taught third grade at the school in Merriman until Ben came, and kept books for half the ranches in the county after.
We had one child, which was one more than the doctors had promised. Ben came at the end of a long bad stretch, when I’d stopped saying the wish out loud, and Tom had taken to leaving the porch light on all night, as though we might be visited. He was born on a February night with the wind screaming out of the northwest. Tom held him in one hand like a loaf of bread and said, “Well. I’ll be.”
