Jen lifted the flap of the white envelope and slid out the contract, and as she read, I saw her free hand drift to her throat. “Kansas Bread and Butter,” she read aloud. “Five million, nine hundred thousand dollars.” She set the jar from my purse beside the page and looked from one to the other, and then through the doorway at the refrigerator, where a jar with the very same logo sat on the top shelf. “Gwen,” she said, in a small voice, “I have eaten these pickles on every sandwich I have made for eight years. I never once asked who made them. I just assumed they came from the store.”
Kurt snatched the contract before I could stop him, and I let him, because by then I wanted him to read it. He read the number once and the color left his face, and then it came back all at once, red as a barn. “Mama,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of the word. “Mama, that is five point nine million dollars.” He laughed, a high, wild sound. “We can do anything with this. We can pay off the combine. We can buy the Dietz place. We can…” He stopped, because I was looking at him. “We,” I said. “It was we, was it, when you told me the claim was denied?”
I took the pencil from the folder of Kurt and wrote the figures on the back of the purchase agreement, in my slow school hand. Eighty eight thousand, four hundred dollars from the insurance company, for the crop my husband never saw cut. Twenty four months of rent at four hundred, nine thousand six hundred more. Ninety eight thousand dollars. I underlined the total twice. “Your father farmed that ground for forty two years,” I said. “He paid that premium every June, and not once did he miss. I want you to look at that number and tell me what it bought.”
A jar of bread and butter pickles with a blue ribbon was set beside a grocery contract and gave one farm widow the afternoon to bring her son back from the elevator.
It was Jen who answered. She stood up from the table, a tall, plain, steady woman with her hair in a clip, and she took the pen out of the hand of Kurt, who had not realized he was still holding it. “I work the teller line at the bank in Salina,” she said. “I have for nine years. I know exactly what an endorsement is, and I know what it is when the name on the check is not the person who signed the back of it.” She turned to her husband. “Kurt, that is forgery. A bank has to report it. I would have to report it.” Her voice shook, but her eyes did not. “I am not going to lie for you.”
Kurt sat down hard. He put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands, and when he spoke it came out in pieces. He had borrowed against the crop in March, a hundred and ten thousand from the elevator, for seed and fuel and the payment on the combine. Then the hail came, three days before harvest, and the insurance on his own acres had lapsed, because he had let the premium slide to save four thousand dollars. “I had nothing, Mama. Nothing. And then your claim came, and I thought, I will use it for ninety days, and pay the elevator, and put it back.” He lifted his face. “I never put it back.”
“You could have asked me,” I said. And Kurt said the thing I have not been able to forget. “You would have said yes.” He stared at me with wet eyes. “That is why I could not ask. You would have said yes, and handed it over without a word, and then I would have had to look at you at the table every Sunday, knowing I was a man who had to be given money by his mother. I thought, if I take it, I do not have to see you give it.” I sat very still. It was the most backward thing I had ever heard a person say. And I understood it all the way down.
So I set the terms, and I set them kindly, which is a harder thing than setting them cold. The truck would be sold. The ninety eight thousand dollars would come back to me within the year, by check, on a schedule that Jen would keep, as she had asked to. The purchase agreement for the land would go through the shredder on the counter, and I would be moving out of the basement that very afternoon, into the bedroom where Vernon and I had slept for forty years. Kurt and Jen could keep their rooms upstairs. But I would be the one, from now on, who signed the checks.
Jen walked me to the basement stairs. She helped me carry down the boxes, though there were only four, and she took the quart jars one at a time off the canning shelf and set them in a laundry basket with a towel between each. At the bottom step she stopped. “Gwen,” she said, “I could have asked where the money came from. I saw the truck. I saw the receipts. I told myself it was not my business.” She wiped her cheek on her shoulder. “It was my business. I am going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you.” I told her she could start by washing the jars.
The pickles went into the stores in March. Kansas Bread and Butter, the label says, and under the name, printed in blue, the handwriting of my mother, copied from the recipe card I have kept in a tin for sixty years. Two cups of sugar. One of vinegar. Sliced thin, packed tight, and do not hurry. The blue ribbon from the state fair is printed on the lid, too, a small blue circle, eleven times over.
Kurt and I cut the wheat in June. It came in thin, but it came, and he sat high in the cab of the combine with the old cap of his father on his head, and I stood at the edge of the field in the heat and watched him make the first pass. I had not seen a header run across that ground in two years. When he came around, he stopped and lowered the window and held up a handful of grain. “Mama,” he called. “It is good wheat.” I said I knew. And I waved, the way Vernon always waved at the end of the first row.