Ray shook his head. "Dad, I don't know what that means."
"It means I don't know yet," Earl said. "Not for sure. That's what the next few weeks are for."
---
They stayed for lunch. Earl made what he always made when people came over, which was fried bologna sandwiches on white bread with mustard and a pot of coffee strong enough to strip paint. They ate on the porch, looking out at the pasture, where the hauler's truck had just arrived with the next four machines.
Ray did not say much. He watched his father eat with the same deliberate slowness he did everything, and he thought about the last few years.
His mother had died six years earlier, after a long illness that had eaten through most of what his parents had saved during their working lives. Earl had closed the shop on the state road eighteen months after the funeral. He had said it was because business had dried up, and that was true; the big dealerships had been pulling work away from independent shops for years, and newer machines were full of computers and proprietary software that a man with wrenches could not touch. But Ray had always suspected the real reason was that his father simply did not know how to be in that building without June Whitaker sitting at the desk in the front office, answering the phone, keeping the books, and telling customers to wait their turn.
Since then, Earl had been quiet. Not depressed exactly. Ray had looked into that, read articles, even asked the family doctor. Just quiet. He fixed things around the house. He helped neighbors when they asked. He went to auctions and looked at machines he did not buy. He sat on the porch in the evenings and watched the light go down over the pasture. He seemed, to Ray, like a man waiting for something, though Ray could never have said what.
And now this.
"Dad," he said finally, when the sandwiches were gone and the coffee was cold. "I'm not trying to be hard on you. I just need to understand. What do you think you're going to do with sixty broken tractors?"
Earl set his cup down on the porch rail.
"Find out what's in them," he said.
"And then what?"
"Then I'll know what to do next."
Ray opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at Megan. Megan was looking at Earl. And Ray realized, with a small, uncomfortable jolt, that his wife was not looking at his father the way Ray was looking at him. She was not looking at a confused old man who had wasted his money.
She was looking at someone she was curious about.
---
On the drive home, Ray gripped the wheel harder than he needed to.