30. Skyler

With the tap of a screen, the combine drives itself.

I sit behind the wheel, fixing a client’s IT disaster from my phone, while the combine mows across the cornfield. Metal teeth grab the stalks, like a vicious zipper, pull the stalk in and devour the cobs. It’s powerful enough to rip a man’s arm off. Which happens often enough. Farming is a dangerous profession. There isn’t room for silly fuck ups.

But you can sit and check your email while your tractor auto-steers across the field.

Technology is a beautiful thing.

And thank God for it. I’m behind enough as it is. Harvest is go-time on the farm, but unfortunately, my company is in the middle of a budget crisis. Too bad no one’s invented cloning technology yet because there isn’t enough of me to go around.

I spot Bo’s black pickup bouncing across the end rows and glance at the clock. Noon, already.

Killing the engine, I climb down from the behemoth tractor. Dust kicks up around my boots as I pick my way across the shorn rows.

Bo leans across his truck console and pushes his passenger door open. “I made you lunch, sweetheart.”

I climb into his truck and study the quinoa salad he shoves into my lap. “Andy made lunch.”

Bo tips his head. “Potatoes, po-tah-toes.”

I leave the salad untouched on my lap. “What’s her angle?”

“A balanced diet with organic, ancient grains or whatever this shit is.”

“I’ve known Andy Reed since I was four and she always has an angle.”

Bo cracks open the seal on a bottle of kombucha and takes a swig, winces. “Tastes like vomit.”

“What’s she want?”

He puts the bottle in the cupholder and pokes at his salad. “She’s got this friend…”

“Pass.”

He frowns at me. “And she lives in Clark…”

“Hard pass.”

“You’re just going to be a lifelong bachelor, then?”

I chuckle. “Sounds fucking fantastic.”

He shrugs, unaffected. “Well, I can say I tried.”

We sit in easy silence for a while. Bo and I have known each other since the beginning of time. He’s not just my cousin, he’s more like a brother. I glance at him. “I saw Uncle Don the last time I was in Denver.”

“Dad mentioned that.”

I shake my head. “No such thing as secrets amongst family members.”

I take a bite of Andy’s salad. It’s not half bad. “No secrets in our family. Except that whole disowning thing. Did you know about that?”

He nods, watching a semi-truck pull a full load of grain down the gravel road.

“You knew?”

I can’t keep the accusation out of my voice. “How come we never talked about it?”

He shrugs, avoiding eye contact. This is an uncomfortable topic for more than one reason. We all know that his dad ended up with the lion’s share of the farm. We just choose to overlook it.

If we took no other lesson from that court battle, the Thomases are now painfully aware of what a property dispute can do to a family.

We could be bitter about it or we could ignore it.

We choose to live with the elephant in the room. Studying Bo, this guy that I shared my youth with, I’m really fucking glad our parents managed to hold on to at least this relationship.

“Dad said you seemed hung up on the homosexuality thing.”

“Homosexuality thing?”

I repeat the phrase, frowning at him.

“But I’ve heard some of the stories from that court battle. I can’t blame our dads for cutting him out of their lives and it ain’t got shit to do with him being gay. He was downright mean in court. You can’t come back from that.”

“It’s the chicken or the egg.”

“What?”

“Grandpa was gone. They could have sided with their own brother. Made things right.”

“Did he even give them a chance to do that?”

I pause. “I really don’t know.”

“Whole thing is pretty fucked up, if you ask me.”

Bo leans back. “I don’t think Cody and I would ever fight like that, but I bet our dads didn’t see themselves fighting like dogs, either.”

“Yeah. I think Mitch and I could handle it, but who knows? I hope we’d do the right thing.”

“We will. We have a pretty good example of what happens when you don’t play nice.”

“Yeah.”

He glances at me. “I heard Mitch is coming back this weekend. He coming over for the game?”

“Yeah. That’s the plan.”

He nods. “I’ll let Cody know. He’ll want to come out to see him.”

I’m looking forward to seeing Mitch. Now that he’s in Denver, it’s few and far between that we can get together. We aren’t perfect and we fight like all brothers do.

But I’d sooner give him the entire farm, every last dime, than cut him out of my life.

That’s the only good thing that came out of our parent’s fuck up.