"He always said those older balers were worth keeping," one man would begin, then stop.
"He did," Mary Ann would answer, sparing him the embarrassment of apologizing.
She was good at the job, if quieter than Evelyn wanted her to be. She knew which feed customers could afford a full month's purchase and which ones were counting money from a folded envelope. She knew which young farmers were pretending not to be worried about their first loans. In the slow afternoons, she swept the aisles twice and arranged seed packets until every row stood perfectly straight. Then she drove home to a house with two empty chairs at the kitchen table and a dog who met her as though she had returned from a journey across the country.
The dog was a yellow-brown mutt named Gus, old enough to be slow when getting up and young enough to chase rabbits when he thought Mary Ann was not watching. He had belonged more to Walter than to her in the beginning. After the funeral he followed Mary Ann from room to room, settling just beyond her feet whenever she stopped moving. She complained that he was always underfoot, then worried if she could not find him for more than a few minutes.
By the fourth year after Walter's death, her days had become smaller without anyone noticing. She mowed the grass near the house, paid the electric bill, drove to town, and sat on the porch facing the pastures she no longer needed. The fields grew thistle and broom sedge. The old equipment shed, once crowded with supplies, stood mostly empty. The farm was neither failing nor succeeding; it was waiting, and she had begun to think perhaps she was waiting with it.
Then Walter's cousin Larry came by one Saturday in March, pulling into the yard in the same dusty pickup he had driven to the funeral. Larry Tovy was a year younger than Walter and had spent nearly three decades working around the tomato cannery eight miles north of town. These days he managed the contracted hauling route, the unglamorous procession of trucks that carried away skins, pulp, and other byproducts after the processing lines finished their work. He arrived with two cups of coffee from the gas station and a request he clearly disliked making.
"You can tell me no before I finish," he said from the porch steps.
"You haven't started," Mary Ann told him.
Larry rubbed his thumb along the paper cup. "We're losing the place that takes the seed waste. New owner wants the property clear before planting season. The cannery's got another disposal contract coming, but there'll be a gap."
Mary Ann waited.
"Your back forty, beyond the old shed, it's been out of production a while. If you let us bring a few loads there, just temporarily, I'd owe you a favor. We'd put it in writing. Nothing dangerous, but I know it won't smell like roses."