Try it now, she said. Cole turned the key. The old engine caught on the first try and settled into a steady, heavy rhythm that filled the whole shed. While it idled, Cole asked her where she had learned to do that. Clare wiped her hands on a rag from his toolbox and told him she had been a diesel mechanic for a little over 11 years.
First at a truck stop outside Denver and then at a fleet shop that serviced city buses. She said it plainly the way he would have said he drove a truck. Then she looked at the tractor and added, "Dad taught me on this one. I was 13." He said, "If I was going to hang around the shed, I'd better be useful."
She told him about summer evenings under the hood. Her father naming every part before he let her touch it. And the first time she changed the oil by herself while he pretended not to check her work afterward. She didn't smile while she told it. She kept one hand flat against the warm side of the engine.
Cole understood then that the machine he was about to chain down wasn't only her father's. It was the last thing still connecting Clare to the girl who had left this farm 15 years ago. They had it loaded a little before 1:00. Cole drove it up the ramps himself, set chains at all four corners, and ratcheted every binder until the tractor sat on the deck like it had been bolted there. Dean watched from the shed and never came over.
When Cole climbed into the cab, Clare climbed in on the other side without asking, and he didn't tell her no. By his math, if the road stayed clear, they would reach Harland with maybe 40 minutes of daylight to spare. They were almost to the highway when Clare took a second sheet of paper from the coat pocket and laid it on the dash. Cole didn't need to read it twice. It was the address of the Ashford Rehabilitation Center.
My dad's room is on the first floor, Clare said. His window faces the road. I need you to stop in front of my dad's window. Cole kept both hands on the wheel and asked her how long she meant by stop. She told him as long as it took.
Then she told him the part she had been holding back since the garage. Her father didn't know that the tractor was leaving today because nobody had told him. Since the stroke, Walter had been asking Dean the same question on every visit when he would be strong enough to go home and get back on the tractor. And Dean kept telling him soon. Dean thinks not telling him is kinder, Clare said.
I think Dad deserves to see it one more time. I think he deserves to say goodbye. Cole saw the problem as clearly as he saw the road ahead. The stop wouldn't be 5 minutes. It meant parking a loaded lowboy on a town street and waiting on nurse's paperwork and a 72-year-old man recovering from a stroke.
Every one of those minutes would come off the daylight he had left. Harland had given him a deadline and Harland was the kind of dealer that remembered which haulers missed them. One late delivery could follow a small outfit like his for years. Clare saw him doing the math. She told him she would pay extra for the stop, whatever it cost him, double if he wanted it.
Cole shook his head and told her he didn't want her money for that, and he meant it. But the money wasn't the reason he had gone quiet. The reason was a picture that had come back to him the moment she said the word goodbye. A picture he had spent 24 years keeping folded away. He was 12 again, standing in the gravel yard with his mother's hand on his shoulder and his father by the fence holding his cap in both hands.
The driver who came for their last tractor was a big man in a blue jacket. And he never once looked at any of them. He wasn't cruel about it. He simply chained the machine down, checked his binders, climbed into his cab, and pulled away as if the family standing 10 ft from his trailer were part of the scenery. Cole had hated that man for years.
Sitting in his own cab now with that address on the dash, he finally understood that he had spent almost 20 years becoming him. He had hauled hundreds of machines away from dying farms and never once looked up at the people on the porch. He had called it professionalism. He had called it a rule. It had only ever been the same thing that driver had done to his family repeated so many times he had stopped seeing it.
At the Ashford exit, he put on his blinker and turned off the highway. The rehabilitation center was a low brick building on the east side of town with a row of first-floor windows facing the street. Cole eased the lowboy along the curb and stopped with the tractor directly in front of the third window from the end. Clare was out of the cab before he set the brake. Through the glass, Cole could see a thin old man in a cardigan sitting in a wheelchair, turning his head slowly toward the sound of the diesel.
Then the old man's hand came up and pressed flat against the window. It took the staff 20 minutes to bundle Walter into a winter coat and a blanket and wheel him down the ramp to the sidewalk. Clare walked beside him the whole way with her hand on his shoulder. Cole stood by the trailer and stayed out of it, but this time he didn't look away. Walter didn't cry.
His face stayed very still as they brought him alongside the deck, and he reached out with his good right hand and laid it on the big rear tire of the John Deere. " Does she still start on the first try?" Walter asked. His voice was rough and slow, but the question came out whole. Clare didn't answer him with words.
She climbed onto the trailer, swung up into the seat, and turned the key. The engine caught on the first try loud and deep in the cold air and a puff of blue smoke rolled out over the sidewalk. For a moment, Walter only listened. Then he laughed a short surprised sound and the nurse behind his chair had to wipe her eyes. They reached Harland Agricultural Equipment an hour and 10 minutes after dark.