Hannah’s eyes went wide.

“All of it?” she asked.

“All of it,” Dean said. She smiled. “It’s time you two learned the value of hard work. Can’t learn that if somebody takes your money.”

She reached across the table and shook Caleb’s hand. Then Hannah’s. A real handshake. Firm.

“Deal?” she said.

“Deal,” the kids said together.

I remember that handshake. I remember the iced tea sweating on the table. I remember Jeff smiling at his mother like he hadn’t seen her smile in a long time.

There was no paper. Of course there wasn’t. You don’t write up a contract with your grandmother over roast chicken.

It was family.

Part Three: Five in the Morning

They started the first week of July.

Every morning, I’d set my alarm for four-forty-five. I’d stand in the kids’ doorways and flip on the lights. Caleb would groan. Hannah would bounce out of bed like it was Christmas.

By five, they’d be in the truck. By five-ten, I’d drop them at the end of Dean’s lane. They’d walk out into the corn in the gray morning light with five-gallon buckets, and I’d sit in the truck for a minute and watch them go.

You pick sweet corn in the cool of the morning. That’s the rule. Dean taught them that.

“Corn picked at noon tastes like cardboard by supper,” she said. “Sugar turns to starch in the heat. You want it cold off the stalk.”

So they picked in the cool. Down the rows, bent over, checking the silk. Brown and dry means ready. Green and wet means wait. Squeeze the ear. Feel for the fat kernels all the way to the tip. Pull down and twist.

By seven o’clock, they’d have forty or fifty dozen in the bins at the stand.

Caleb did the heavy work. He hauled the full buckets from the field, two at a time. He stacked the ears in bundles of thirteen, a baker’s dozen, the way Dean always did. He kept the stand swept and the bins full.

Hannah ran the money.

The cash box was an old green metal one, the kind with a little key and a handle on top. Walt bought it in 1981 along with the lumber for the stand. It sat on a shelf at the back of the stand, a little too high for a nine-year-old.

So Hannah stood on a bucket.

An overturned five-gallon pickle bucket from the restaurant supply store. She stood on it every morning for nine weeks, counting change, making small talk with customers, telling everyone who stopped that her grandma grew the best corn in Auglaize County.

They worked six days a week. Seven to one. Monday through Saturday. Sundays off because Dean said the Lord rested, so they could too.

Rain or shine. Heat or not. July in western Ohio can hit ninety-five with humidity so thick you can drink it. Some days the cars came one after another. Some days they sat for an hour without a single customer.

Five dollars a dozen.

At one o’clock, Dean would come out of the house and walk down to the stand. She’d count the cash box. She’d write the number in a little spiral notebook. Then she’d put the money in an envelope and hand it to Hannah.

“Good day,” she’d say. Or, “Slow day. Tomorrow’ll be better.”

Every afternoon when I picked them up, Hannah would climb into the truck holding that envelope like it was made of gold.

When we got home, the kids would go straight to the kitchen windowsill.

There was an old Folgers coffee can there. Red, with a plastic lid. Caleb had cut a slot in the lid with my kitchen scissors. Hannah had decorated it with stickers. Unicorns and baseballs and a sticker from the dentist that said I WAS BRAVE TODAY.

On a strip of masking tape on the front, in Caleb’s careful handwriting, it said: CALEB & HANNAH — CORN MONEY.