Page 33 of Always Meant for You
If you build it, they will come?
Maybe in the movies, but not in Elverna.
We grew it, and not a damn person cares. It doesn’t matter how hard we work, how much we break our backs—none of it means anything if no one knows what we’ve done—what we’ve accomplished.
And time’s not on our side.
Farms are going under. It’s on me to turn it around. It’s on me to keep my promise to my best friend.
“Cal?”
It’s my farmhand, Abe Garver. His dark hair is tangled from the wind, sweat clings to his brow. He shifts his weight, rocking from one mud-streaked boot to the other.
“Yeah?” I murmur.
“We should wrap it up. We’ve been here since eight.”
Beside him, Kenny, his twin, offers a hopeful smile. But it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“It might be better next week,” Kenny offers.
I glance at my watch, which once belonged to my grandfather. Two minutes until the market officially ends.
I cross my arms. “We wait.”
Kenny cringes. “But it’s?—”
I cut him off with a look.
Yeah, it’s only two minutes. But two minutes is still two minutes. I live by structure, by routine, and the idea of quitting early, even by a hair, sits wrong with me.
We stay until the end.
I watch the secondhand crawl through the last ninety seconds. At the top of the hour, I give the nod.
“Let’s pack it up.”
“Yes, sir,” Abe says softly.
I hired the Garver twins last year after the bank took their land. They’re only a few years younger than me. Good guys. Hard workers. They’ve more than earned their keep.
And I need them.
I’m not in the fields as much these days. I still work the land, but there’s a lot more desk work than I’d like. And I’ve got to make payroll. The brothers live in a trailer on the far side of the west field. It’s not much, but they make it work.
We all do in Elverna.
If you’d told me five years ago this is where we’d end up, I would’ve laughed in your face. Jamie and I thought we had it all mapped out. Thought we accounted for every problem, every bump. Thought we’d built a plan for prosperity.
Now it’s just me. Alone at the helm. Trying to stay the course.
I step into the center of the square. “Folks, let’s close it down. We’ll try again next week.”
A chorus of groans peppers the air.
“Cal, we can’t have many more weeks like this.” Tobias Stewart, an old farmer with a short fuse, calls out from his folding chair, arms crossed over his faded denim overalls, his ball cap pulled low to shade his squint.
At the dairy table, Lawrence Sperry leans on a cooler, his sleeves rolled past thick forearms, tanned from decades in the sun.
