Page 39 of While the Sun Shines

“Everything okay?” Cooper calls.

“Fine!” Drew shouts back as he circles around the baler.

He doesn’t want to look inside. Wants to just hide from whatever sight is waiting for him, but there’s Whit pulling the truck over, and Penny still standing on the field’s edge, her eyes on him.

There’s a half-formed flake of hay inside the baler, strands of grass twisted over each other and tangled with knotted baling twine.

And the shear bolt cleaved in two pieces, shining back at him as it glints in the sun.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The metal side of the baler is hot when Drew leans his forehead against it. It smells like grease and diesel exhaust and is probably staining his shirt when he slumps the rest of his weight onto it too.

“Hey,” Cooper says from just behind him.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Anything.”

“Drew,” he says, as gentle as Drew’s ever heard him.

“I’m going to crawl into the tractor bucket and live in there for the rest of my life.”

“Cool,” Cooper says. “So, I’ll take everyone back to the farm and leave you here to slowly die?”

“Please.”

Cooper squeezes his shoulder. “Sounds like a plan, my man.”

Cut hay rustles under Cooper’s feet as he walks away. Drew can hear it clearly in the lull left by the silenced tractor, the air empty of the pounding of the baler and the thump as bales fall out behind it.

The sun burns over the back of his neck, competing to turn his skin red from the mortification that crawls over him. The heat of the day sticks his shirt to his sweaty skin, so even when he straightens from his slouch, the fabric seems to want to hold him in that shape, bent against the baler and cowed under the weight of the afternoon.

Drew only raises his head when he hears the truck start. One door slams, then two. Cooper’s driving, Whit next to him in the passenger seat. And there, balanced on the tailgate, is Abelardo, with Penny beside him, the backs of their heads to Drew, their shoulders close together.

Cooper reverses, the tires cut to the side. Then he stops, turns them the other way, and pulls forward. The truck bed swings toward Drew in a slow pivot. Penny and Abelardo sit with their feet dangling, the two of them swaying with the uneven rock of the truck as Cooper eases it over the rough field edge.

Penny stares at him as Cooper pulls away. Keeps her eyes on him, all the way across the field with its windrows of hay, over the bulk of the baler Drew wants to duck behind. Instead, he fiddles with the broken shear bolt, like he can press the metal halves back together with just his fingers. Unknot the mangled machinery behind it, the metal that wasn’t supposed to twist and then break, because he wasn’t supposed to keep driving after that first metal-on-metal grind.

Penny doesn’t look away as the truck disappears down the curve in the road, and only when it’s gone does he breathe. Steps away from the baler too, giving up on pretending to fix it. And sits down, knees drawn up, his forearms draped over them. Not even in the shade, just letting the day’s heat beat onto his head, sweat stinging his eyes, and his shirt itching where it clings to his shoulders.

“You all right there, hon?”

Caroline walks closer, until her shadow falls over him. Quickly, he wipes at his eyes, nodding.

“Bad luck with the baler?” She peers into the panel he’d lifted and tuts softly. “Well, that’s a shame, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t bad luck; it was his own stupid decision to keep driving after he heard the shear bolt break. Drew’s hands hang limp between his knees and he could say that, correct her, own up to what he did, but the words stick in his throat.

“Here, I was bringing this over for all of you, so at least enjoy yours.” She presses a frosty glass of lemonade into his hand. And sure enough, she’s holding a pitcher, full to the brim, with a sprig of mint and two wheels of sliced lemon nestled among the ice cubes.

He manages a sip. “Thanks.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I watched your Uncle Bert and your dad hay this entire field with the wrong tension on the baling twine? Each bale they picked up just fell apart, one after the next.” She tops up his glass, shaking an extra ice cube into his drink. “I was over there on the porch, and I would’ve helped them load up the hay wagon, but instead they ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to save their bales before your grandfather caught sight of what they’d done.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard that story.”