I stood very still.

“Eat your pie,” he said, gruffly. “I’ll go get Gene.”

Gene Pokorny lived four miles east on a ranch his grandfather had homesteaded. He was fifty-three, a big sunburned man with a beard going gray, and he was the sort who would argue with a fence post for the pleasure of it. He and Tom had gone to school together. They had fought once, in the eighth grade, over a girl who married neither of them, and had been loud, affectionate enemies ever since.

He came in his own truck at noon, with Arlen behind him. I was in the stackyard directing traffic with a clipboard, because I’d had to do something with my hands. Ben was up on a tractor beside me, moving bales into rows with the loader. He hadn’t said a word all morning. I could see his jaw working under the brim of Tom’s old Pioneer cap, which was a size too large and slid down over his eyes.

Gene got out and stood with his hands on his hips, looking over the stackyard. Twenty-three bales sat in neat rows. A fresh one was coming off Arlen’s flatbed every few minutes, thumping onto the ground.

“A hundred bales,” Gene said. “I’ve got the rest of ’em on my trailer. Figured I’d bring ’em back.”

“You didn’t have to come yourself.”

“I did.”

“Gene, you paid for that hay. It’s fair ”

“Karen.” He took off his cap and crushed it in both hands. “I’m going to say something, and I want you to let me finish. I paid your brother-in-law eight dollars a bale for hay that was worth seventy. I knew it. I knew it the second he named the price. And I told myself, ‘Well, the widow needs cash, and Dwayne’s family, and who am I to ask.’” He looked at the cap. “That’s what I told myself. What I actually thought was, ‘This is a hell of a deal.’”