Caleb was twelve that summer. Tall and skinny, with his father’s sandy hair and his father’s habit of saying very little and noticing everything. He’d started reading Louis L’Amour westerns at nine and never stopped.
Hannah was nine. Small, freckled, fierce. She had opinions about everything and announced all of them. She wanted to be a veterinarian, a professional softball player, and the president, in that order.
That summer, they wanted one thing.
To earn their own money.
Part Two: The Stand
My mother-in-law is Deanna Lund. Everyone in town calls her Dean. She’s sixty-eight.
She lives on the home place, two miles south of us on Kuether Road. A hundred and sixty acres that have been in the Lund family since 1893. Jeff’s father, Walt, farmed it until he died of a stroke three years ago. Since then, Dean has rented out most of the ground to a neighbor and kept twelve beef cows and a few acres for herself.
And every summer, for as long as anyone can remember, she’s grown sweet corn.
Three acres of it. In the field along the county road, right in front of the house. Peaches and Cream, mostly, and some Silver Queen for the late season. People drive out from Celina and Wapakoneta and St. Marys just to buy Dean Lund’s sweet corn.
She sells it from a little wooden stand at the end of her driveway. Walt built it in 1981. Painted white with a green roof. A hand-painted sign hangs from the front, faded but still readable.
DEAN’S SWEET CORN. $5 A DOZEN.
Dean’s knees got bad two summers ago. She couldn’t stand at the stand all day anymore. Couldn’t do the early-morning picking.
So in May, she called Jeff.
“Do you think the kids would want to run the stand this summer?” she asked. “They’re old enough now. Caleb especially.”
We had her over for supper that Sunday to talk about it.
I remember it clearly. Roast chicken and mashed potatoes and Dean’s own canned green beans from last summer. Iced tea in tall glasses. Dean sitting at the end of our kitchen table, where she always sits when she comes over.
She laid out the plan.
The kids would pick in the morning while it was cool. Run the stand from seven to one, six days a week. She’d show them how to pick, how to bag, how to count change.
“And whatever you make,” she said, looking right at Caleb and Hannah, “you keep.”
