Slowly Becky walked to the back, returning with the cold cans in her arms. In the dark she took one of the Dr Peppers and peeled off its tab. And then she coughed, and coughed, and dug back into the cavities of her nose and throat so she could hock one perfect glob of phlegm into the soda.
Opening the office door she stamped a smile on her face and felt powered up with love for her daddy. And for how little he knew.
Early the next morning Becky stared up at her bedroom ceiling and thought that they were stuck: her father wouldn’t admit to her how bad things really were, and she wouldn’t force him to because she knew she was supposed to be reassured. Would it be different if her mother were here, if the cancer in her breast hadn’t burst its bounds and spilled into other parts of her body, killing her when Becky was six? Maybe her mother would have been the one to size up the situation and say it straight: Hank, we need to do something else. There would have been a “we,” someone for her father to share his fears and strategies with, someone from whom he would take counsel.
Though thank god he’d never married any of the loud-laughers Becky knew he sometimes bought dinner for at the Black Owl, and probably went home with for a few hours when he thought he wouldn’t be missed. What they really didn’t need around here was a hysterical second wife flailing about when the electric was shut off or the bank called, making visible what they were all supposed to ignore: Daddy’s business, circling the drain.
Becky kicked off the unbearable covers. She’d been fighting to pretend a hot nauseous pain hadn’t been growing in her lower belly all night. She pulled a sweatshirt over her nightgown and let herself out the kitchen door into the predawn chill, breathing fresh air into her lungs. The fading moon, a thick lemon slice, hung low over a clump of horse chestnuts separating their property from whoever had bought the Hinmans’ place.
It was freezing, but at least she wasn’t about to puke. Becky found a pair of old rainboots on the cluttered porch and walked circles in their mostly dirt yard. Cars were beginning to flow on County Road M, and a lone crow yelped once overhead, and then again from farther away.
If they lost the house, she supposed they’d try to get one of the rentals in town. Maybe a long-term efficiency in the Rose Suites, just off the highway; how much were those? Her father would get a job, eventually, at someone else’s store. Becky guessed she’d have to drop out of school, go full time as a waitress. She recoiled, thinking of how her father would paper it over: for a little while. Start you up again in the fall. And season would slide into season, year into year, and she’d turn into one of those hatchet-faced diner lifers with varicose veins and dead eyes.
Cold but afraid to go inside, Becky went to the barn, where a stack of boxes—blades or spades—had been dumped after delivery, and left out or forgotten. She tugged open the sliding door, nudged the boxes in with her foot, and then sat down on them. The haphazard collection of inventory in progress was loosely arranged according to a system only her father knew. Becky held her stomach and bent over, a rolling pain built of nausea. No denying it—she’d caught that damn flu and now she’d have to do all the sheets and towels again.
And how dare that bald pig grab at her like that? Right in her father’s own showroom! She wanted to torch that whole place, combines, office, and all. Burn it down with that fat fuck locked in.
That’s when the idea came. The first idea, the one that led to a chain of other ideas, spreading into a yearlong series of changes that would eventually turn everything around for them. For her.
The idea was—Wait, she begged her nausea, give me a minute to think. She lurched up and took a full circle to see all the boxes and the unused space and the strong beams and the warm familiar wood smell—Do we need a showroom anyway?
Becky threw up then, spattering the rainboots, and did it a dozen more times that morning. But between bouts she huddled in bed with a pen and a pad and all the financial records she could find at home. Later that night, her father brought in his most recent files, bewildered by her vehement phone calls. By then Becky had run the numbers so many times that she shook with excitement and fear as she raced to explain the plan to her tired father. Drop the showroom, save 14K rent for the year. Clear out the barn and use that instead. Save on gas, electric, heat, security. Reduce inventory by half but keep up wholesale orders for longtime customers. Stop sending receivables to Manheim Accounting—Becky herself would do the books. Market the whole idea with the slogan “We Pass the Savings On to You.”
Hank Farwell told his sick teenage daughter to take a can of ginger ale and get back in bed. But he sat up late with the scribbled pages. Becky’s plan got put into action over the next six months and by the end of the year all of Pierson was talking about Farwell Agriculture Inc.’s miraculous rise from the dead. How it just went to show that one of their own (they meant Hank) could get it done with some grit and quick thinking.
All year Becky supervised the rebirth of the business. She reorganized the barn and ordered a farwell agriculture inc. sign directing people where to turn off Route 4. She threw a “Thank You for Your Business” lemonade party in June that raffled off a John Deere tractor, their last, and gave twenty-five percent off new standing orders. She read up on accounting and took the bus to a one-day small business conference in Rockford, flummoxing the organizers when they realized they had registered a high school sophomore. By winter, Becky was friendly with all the suppliers on the phone, and handled all orders, often combining shipments and suggesting discounts that were impossible to refuse. Her father took care of what he’d always done best: talking wary locals through every angle of a purchase.
One Sunday evening that winter, the Farwells hosted a small gathering in their home. The local Rotary Club, after snubbing Hank for years, had welcomed him back into the fold after the business made its one-eighty. Several men now called up to a week ahead to make sure he would attend the next meeting.
Pierson men had a subset of the Rotary, an unofficial club for those in agribusiness. Hank was now avidly pursued to join these evenings as well. The habit was to hold a bimonthly get-together at someone’s home, rotating around the farmhouses of the members, usually on a weekend evening after dinner. A nominal subject would be set for discussion—price of seed in the Rock River area, for example—but the two-hour sit-down was mostly gossip (who was slipping), politics (Reagan and subsidies), and laughter among a handful of men whose thickened hides and long workdays didn’t offer much opportunity for that.
That Sunday, the first time Hank hosted, the men entered the property under Hank’s new plastic sheet sign flapping in the night wind against two fourteen-foot metal poles: we pass the savings on to you. They went by stakes marking out a barn extension for smaller handheld tools. The winter had been cold but dry; the men hardly had any snow to knock off their boots before finding seats in Hank’s warmly lit living room, with its new TV set and new double-pane storm windows.
It was the unspoken custom for the host’s wife to provide coffee and some kind of sweet—a nut cake usually—and then to immediately withdraw. The men fell quiet when Becky brought in the tray. Later, they would all become accustomed to her at every business meeting or social event or club date that had to do with agribusiness in the county. They’d hardly remember a time before she was a part of it all.