Part Four: The Asking
Megan got engaged in October.
Scott Hendricks. He’s a pharmacist at the Walgreens in Murfreesboro. Quiet, polite, with glasses and a dry sense of humor. He coached middle school basketball on the side.
I liked him. Everybody did.
In November, Megan called me.
It was a Tuesday evening. I was grading papers at the kitchen table in my little house at the end of the lane. I’d moved out of the farmhouse when I was twenty-five and built a small place on the back corner of the property, overlooking the hay.
“Laney,” Megan said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
There was a pause.
“Scott and I want to get married on the farm,” she said. “In June. In the hayfield. Behind the house.”
I said yes before she’d even finished asking.
I didn’t think about it. I didn’t need to. It was my sister. It was Grandpa’s land. It was a wedding.
“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you need.”
Megan was quiet for a moment.
“Really?” she said.
“Really,” I said. “Grandpa would’ve loved that.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just said thank you, quietly, and hung up.
I bush-hogged the clearing twice that spring. Once in April and once in late May. The flat area at the bottom of the slope behind the farmhouse, where the hay meets the yard.
I hauled off a dead cedar tree. I filled in a groundhog hole with a wheelbarrow of gravel. I mowed a path from the parking area down to where the arbor would go.
I gave up the whole first cutting on the bottom forty for her day.
That’s the part people don’t understand.
The first cutting is the best hay of the year. It’s what pays my bills. Timothy and orchardgrass, cut in early June at the boot stage, when the protein’s highest. The horse people in Franklin and Brentwood pay twelve dollars a square bale for first cutting timothy. Sometimes more.
The bottom forty usually makes about two thousand bales.
But the bottom forty is the field behind the farmhouse. The field where Megan wanted to get married.
If I cut it in early June, like I should, it’d be stubble and windrows on her wedding day. Bare dirt and drying hay. Not the picture she wanted.
So I left it standing.
All of it. Forty acres of timothy, gold at the tips, waving in the wind behind her altar.
I’d cut it the Monday after the wedding. It would be past its prime by then. Stemmy. Lower protein. I’d lose about half the value.
Eleven or twelve thousand dollars.
I never told Megan any of that.
I never asked her for a dime for the land. I never asked her to pay me for the hay. I never mentioned it at all.
Part Five: The Tents
The only real bill was the tents.
Megan wanted two big white tents. One for the reception and one for the food and the bar. In case of rain. In case of too much sun.
Bedford County Party Rentals in Shelbyville had them. Forty by sixty, white vinyl, with sidewalls and string lights. Delivered and set up the day before. Taken down the day after.
Fourteen hundred dollars.
In April, the rental company called me.
Because the wedding was on my property, they needed the landowner to sign the delivery agreement. They needed somebody to be responsible for the stakes and the damage.
“And who’s paying the invoice?” the woman asked.
“My sister,” I said. “I’ll have her call you.”
I called Megan that night.
“Hey,” I said. “Bedford Rentals called. They need the deposit for the tents. Can you and Scott cover that?”
There was a long pause.
“Since it’s at your place,” Megan said, “I figured that would be your part.”
I sat at my kitchen table.
I thought about the forty acres of first-cutting timothy I was leaving standing. The twelve thousand dollars I’d lose.
I thought about bush-hogging twice. Hauling off the cedar. Filling the groundhog hole.
I didn’t say any of that.
“The tents should be yours, Meg,” I said quietly. “Think about it.”
There was another long pause.
“Fine,” she said.
It was the kind of fine that isn’t fine. The kind our mother says when she’s about to stop speaking to you for three days.
Megan hung up.
