Forty Dozen Before Noon

Part One: The Coffee Can

The receipt was on her kitchen counter.

I saw it on a Sunday afternoon in late August, when I stopped by my mother-in-law’s farmhouse to drop off a pan of zucchini bread. She was out on the back porch snapping green beans into a dishpan. I set the bread on the counter next to the bread box, and that’s when I saw the slip of paper tucked under the edge of her sugar canister.

Pink. Carbon copy. The kind the feed store still uses because old Mr. Hartley refuses to buy a computer.

Hartley Feed and Seed. Account: D. Lund. Paid in full. $2,400.00.

I knew that number.

I knew it the way you know your own phone number, or your kids’ birthdays, or the price of a gallon of milk. I’d watched it grow in a coffee can on my kitchen windowsill all summer long.

Twenty-four hundred dollars.

That was my kids’ money.

My name is Amy Lund. I’m thirty-nine years old.

I live on twenty acres outside New Bremen, Ohio, in the flat, green farm country of the western part of the state. The land out here is so level you can watch your neighbor’s dog run away for two days. Corn and soybeans in every direction. Red barns. Church steeples. Grain elevators standing up against the sky like giants.

I’m a dental hygienist in Celina, three days a week. My husband, Jeff, manages the parts department at a tractor dealership in Minster. We have two kids.