I picked a Tuesday afternoon. Vern was in the shop, working on the planter. It was twelve degrees outside and the woodstove in the corner of the shop was going.

I brought him a cup of coffee. I stood by the workbench.

“Vern,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

He looked up from the planter. “Sure.”

“Nate and I need more,” I said. “Five hundred more a month. Two thousand instead of fifteen hundred.”

He set down his wrench.

“The trailer furnace quit twice this winter,” I said. “In January, for three days. We slept in our coats. Then again in February. The repairman says it’s done. It needs to be replaced. That’s thirty-two hundred dollars.”

Vern didn’t say anything.

“And we haven’t had a raise in ten years,” I said. “Not once. Everything costs more than it did ten years ago. Groceries, gas, insurance. We’re paying for our own health insurance on the MNsure exchange. That’s six hundred and forty a month by itself.”

I took a breath.

“Five hundred, Vern. That’s all I’m asking.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he picked up his wrench again.

“There’s no money this year, Holly,” he said.

He went back to the planter. That was all.

I stood there by the workbench for a minute. The woodstove ticked. The coffee I’d brought him sat on the bench, steaming.

I knew it wasn’t true.

I keep the books. I knew exactly how much money there was. Last fall’s crop had been the best in five years. Two hundred and eight bushels an acre on the corn, fifty-eight on the beans. We’d sold some at harvest and stored the rest. There were fourteen thousand bushels of corn sitting in the big bin, waiting for a better price.

At four-sixty a bushel, that was over sixty thousand dollars.

There was money. There just wasn’t money for us.

I walked back to the trailer in the snow. Nate was inside, sitting at the little kitchen table in his coveralls, eating a sandwich. He looked up when I came in.

“Well?” he said.

“He said there’s no money this year.”

Nate set his sandwich down. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“There’s fourteen thousand bushels in the big bin,” he said finally.

“I know.”

He looked out the window at the shop. At the smoke coming out of the stovepipe.

“Okay,” he said. That’s all. Okay.

That night the furnace quit again.

At two in the morning. I woke up shivering. Nate was already out of bed, in his long underwear, banging on the furnace closet with a flashlight. I could hear him swearing under his breath.

He got it going around three-thirty. He came back to bed and lay there with his arm over his eyes.

“I’m going to fix this, Holly,” he said in the dark. “I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to.”

Chapter Three: The Corn

In June, fourteen thousand bushels of corn went out of the bin.

I watched the trucks come. Three semis from the elevator in Marshall. They backed up to the big bin, one after another, and the auger ran for two days. I stood at the trailer window with a cup of coffee and watched the corn pour out into the trucks in a long gold stream.

I wrote the grain tickets into the books that night. Fourteen thousand, two hundred bushels. At four-forty-one. Sixty-two thousand, six hundred and twenty-two dollars.

Vern had waited for the June rally. It came. He sold.

It paid for Tiffany’s barn wedding.

Tiffany is Nate’s little sister. She was twenty-eight that summer. She lives in Minneapolis now. She’s a marketing director for a company that makes yoga clothes. She met her fiancé, Brandon, on a dating app. He works in finance. Something with spreadsheets. He wears loafers without socks.

They wanted a barn wedding. On the farm. In Vern’s old red hay barn, the one built in 1912 by Nate’s great-grandfather.