“Why them?” I asked.
“Because Luis asked me where the tile ran before he asked me the price,” Dale said. “That’s how I knew.”
He kept the home place: the house, the machinery, and the remaining four hundred acres. And he learned to farm. Badly at first. Those first months, he called me at six in the morning with questions. Annie, the planter’s making a noise. Annie, what’s a pop-up fertilizer? I answered them. I sat on my porch with my coffee and talked him through replacing a seed tube over the phone while the sun came up.
He took a crop insurance policy through the co-op, and he called me about every line in it. He paid the September property taxes himself, on time, and sent me a photo of the receipt with no message, just a thumbs-up.
He cut his insurance practice back to two days a week. In the second spring, he quit it altogether.
“I miss the suit,” he said, grinning, on the phone. “I don’t miss the commute.”
