The planter was still half full of seed when they hauled the tractor home. Nobody finished that field for nine days.

Then the neighbors came. Twelve of them, with their own tractors and their own seed. They planted the south quarter and the north quarter and everything else in one Saturday, while I sat in my kitchen with a casserole dish somebody brought and didn’t eat it.

Mike ran the tender truck. All day. He didn’t stop for lunch. He didn’t come in the house.

Chapter Three: Every Single Day

I am a school cook.

I’m the head cook at Cedar Bend Public Schools. Kindergarten through twelfth grade, all in one building. Three hundred and eleven kids. I’ve been doing it for fourteen years.

I can feed three hundred kids a hot lunch by eleven. Chicken and noodles. Taco salad. Sloppy joes and tater tots. I know how much flour makes how many rolls. I know which kids need seconds and which kids take food home in their pockets on Fridays.

I did not know how to feed a steer to finish.

I grew up in Lincoln. My dad was a mail carrier. My mom was a bank teller. We had a cat.

I met Brent at the state fair when I was twenty-two. He was showing a heifer. I was eating a corn dog. He walked his heifer past me and she sneezed on my corn dog, and he was so embarrassed he bought me another one, and that was that.

I learned a lot about cattle in fourteen years of marriage. I can pull a calf. I can doctor pinkeye. I can read a feed tag.

But feeding a show steer is something else. It’s a science and an art and a religion. Brent knew it. His dad knew it. I’d always just watched.

Cooper did.

That’s what I found out. Two weeks after the funeral. When I came out to the barn at five-thirty in the morning, because I couldn’t sleep, and found my son already there.

In the dark, with the shop light on. Mixing feed. From the notebook. Weighing every scoop on the old hanging scale.

He had his dad’s notebook open on the fence post and the ration on the co-op receipt.

He looked up when I came in.

“I can do it, Mom,” he said. Before I could say anything. “I know the ration. Dad showed me all winter. I know when to step him up. I know how to weigh it.”

He poured the feed into the bunk. Moose came over and started eating.

“I can do it,” Cooper said again. Then his voice cracked. “I just can’t rinse him and hold him at the same time.”

So I learned.

That’s all. I just learned. The way I learned to make chicken and noodles for three hundred, the way I learned to pull a calf. One day at a time.

Cooper taught me. Thirteen years old, standing in the barn in his dad’s cap, telling me what to do.

Feed at five-thirty and ten.

Five-thirty in the morning, before I left for the school kitchen. Ten at night, after I got home and made supper and checked homework. Weighed out on the hanging scale. Every scoop.

Rinse at noon, three and six.

You rinse a show steer to keep him cool and to train his hair. Cold water from the hose, all over, every inch. In the summer you do it three times a day. Noon, when it gets hot. Three, when it’s hottest. Six, when it starts to cool.

I drove home from the school at noon on my lunch break, every day, all summer, to rinse that steer. Twelve minutes each way. I ate a sandwich in the truck.

Brush the hair up, blow it dry, walk him down the lane.

That’s the evening. After the six o’clock rinse. You brush the hair against the grain with a stiff brush, so it stands up. Then you blow it dry with a big blower that sounds like a jet engine. So the hair trains to grow up and out, so he looks fuller.

Then you put the halter on and walk him. Down the lane to the mailbox and back. Twice. To keep his legs strong. To teach him to walk slow and set his feet square when you stop.

Cooper led. I walked behind with the show stick, the way he showed me.

An old neighbor told me one thing that summer.

Elmer Pruss. Eighty-four. He farmed the quarter across the road from us for sixty years. He showed steers at the Platte Valley County Fair from 1952 to 1958. He still had his purple ribbons in a frame in his living room.

He came over in June, in his old Ford pickup, and leaned on the steer pen and watched me rinse Moose. He didn’t say anything for twenty minutes.

Then he said, “You’re doing it right.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Elmer.”

He spit tobacco juice in the dirt.

“Feeding cattle isn’t a man’s job or a woman’s job,” he said. “It’s an every-single-day job.”

He got back in his pickup and drove home.

I wrote it on a piece of masking tape and stuck it to the inside of the barn door.

Chapter Four: The Boots

Brent’s work boots sat on the back step after the funeral.

Brown leather. Red Wing. The pair he wore every day for six years. Creased across the toes and worn down at the heels. Scuffed white on the right toe where he always kicked the tractor tire.

He’d left them there on the morning of May ninth. He’d put on his other boots, the rubber ones, because it rained the night before and the field was muddy. These were sitting right where he left them, on the back step, side by side.

Nobody moved them. Not for weeks.