I figured if I stared long enough at my phone, as it lay on the kitchen table in front of me, I could will it to ring. I was right; after a few minutes, it buzzed. I finished cutting my daughter’s lunch into choke-proof-size bites and looked closer at the phone. A text from my husband. He was either in between classes or watching his kids take a quiz he’d popped on them out of nowhere.
Don’t forget, he wrote. There’s stuff to pick up at the co-op.
It wasn’t much detail, but we’d talked about it yesterday, and I knew what the stuff was: materials to build our chicken coop. We were past the planting season on our farm, and chickens were the next project. I wasn’t as sure that chickens would materialize this season, but I knew Daniel at least wanted to build the coop for next year.
It’d be ten minutes each way, plus however long it took to load the wood, baling wire, and whatever else Hopkins had set aside for us. My success was contingent on Fay staying in her good mood if she came along. I looked at her as she smiled with a Cheerio trapped gingerly between her top and bottom front teeth.
“Don’t you choke,” I said, and she bit down, most of the O going where it belonged, the rest on her high-chair tray. I looked at my phone, thumbed to the A’s for my two aunts, who never said no to watching Fay for a bit. Fay was still smiling, and I told myself this might work, and I could save my aunts’ charity for a rainier day, a longer trip.
So we cruised, me and Fay, in the pickup. Across the river where the farms ended and civilized town began: the Sam’s Club, the Hardee’s everyone hated, and the squat concrete bunker that served as the VFW Hall. Fay rested her feet on the dash, periodically making a grab at the straps on her little sandals or at the car-seat restraint. It wasn’t ideal, this arrangement, car seat on the passenger side of the cab. Probably wasn’t legal either, but the cops in town didn’t give us crap. The farmers’ co-op was about as far as we drove like this, and that was only when Daniel had the little car with him at school.
The co-op sat in the nexus between town and where farmland resumed on the town’s far side. I always loved how the gravel in the parking lot scratched back at our tires as we pulled in. I squinted at the front door, noting the “We’re OPEN” sign. Regulars like us were used to rolling up early afternoon, only to be rebuked by the co-op’s “Back At . . .” sign, its red hands usually pointing to an hour of the morning ambitiously early for someone like Hopkins.
We left the truck and Fay made it clear she didn’t want my hand to hold, so I used my knees to gently shepherd her towards the door, even though there was no other reasonable direction for her to venture. We stumbled in together, as the bell overhead tinkled. Hopkins leaned casual against the counter, but his eyes were locked tight in our direction. He drummed his hands on the surface, then straightened up and yelled, “Elena! Queen Harvest has surely come.” I never knew what he meant by the Queen Harvest part, but he said it nearly every time I showed my face here.
I’d known Hopkins from before high school. He was best friends with my boyfriend back then. Or at least, Eric had been his best friend. Some people thought Hopkins was more a sidekick, albeit a charming one. And although I resisted the urge to ask, to confirm, I was smug in my assumption he was one of the few of us around town who still knew where Eric Meade was and what he was up to.
“Surprised you’re here and not down at the Lookout,” I said. I nodded at the clock over his shoulder, which showed just past eleven. “Guess they may not be open yet.”
“The hell?” he exclaimed, eyes wide in fake shock. “They close?” I nodded, playing along. “Why just yesterday,” he continued, “I stopped in there for breakfast.”
“What kind of spread they putting out these days?” I looked down at Fay, whose mood continued its slight downturn. She’d withdrawn and was wrapped around my leg, hiding. “Do they really have curds now?”
“They do,” he said. “Not as good as the gas station’s, but yeah. . . .” He nodded his head as he trailed off, no doubt thinking about how good the cheese curds were at the gas station around the corner from Daniel and me.
Some version of the co-op had existed as long as the town had, but I’d concede my knowledge was only the last iceberg-tip sliver of its history. The version I knew was the important one. Hopkins had, through funding improbably his own, renovated the inside like new, even exorcising the funked-feed smell that had persisted for generations. Newly varnished barnwood covered most surfaces, reflecting the light that trickled in from above. The transoms, that top layer, were the only source of sun, but they bordered all four walls of the building and caught outside light till midafternoon, which was usually when he shut shit down to go get drunk.
Stacked bags of seed and feed lined two of the walls, with more behind the counter, commingled without a hint of organization. Hopkins alone knew what was where, both out front and back in storage. Right inside the door was a gumball machine, full to the top, and next to it was a similar dispenser, which held plastic football helmets. The sun had faded the helmets’ vintage color. Most of the team logos looked outdated to me, which made me wonder how old the neighboring gumballs were. I’d noticed on previous visits that the base of the gumball machine wasn’t bolted to the floor—as it would be in any normal establishment—which is what you notice with a child Fay’s age and temperament. You know to case the location like you’re going to pull a bank robbery. The helmet dispenser had a wide, thick base, and I suspected it would take a couple of people to upend it if they were so inclined.
“Don’t I have stuff in back for you?” Hopkins asked.
“I sure hope,” I said. It was the whole point of the trip. I should say that he had retained youthful good looks, which I’d mostly ignored back when we met, but they now redeemed an otherwise pointless trip to the co-op.
“Let’s see what’s what,” he said, as he slapped the counter with each hand in turn and then went in the back.
I realized Fay was no longer clutching my leg. I looked down, just as she grabbed my hand and led me around the store that was not really a store. Occasionally, Hopkins sold goods and supplies, but more often they were simply exchanged, a Turkish bazaar supplanted to the middle of Wisconsin. Sometimes through largesse unknown to the rest of us, he would just give away bags of feed or other useful materials.
“Found it,” he yelled from the back, the singularity of the final word puzzling me. There was more than just a simple it, I presumed, involved in turning the bare patch of land behind our machine shed into a functional, welcoming home for a brood of hens. Since he didn’t reappear right away, I figured he’d recognized his mistake and gone back to rummage for the plurality of the missing items.
I followed Fay to a pile of seed bags. She reached over her head to the top of the stack and said, “Pee-yo.” It took a second longer than it should to realize what she meant.
“That’s right. Fay go nigh-nigh,” I said, playing along as though she thought it was her bed at home.
She shook her head, eyes screwed closed, wrenched her hand from mine and ran over to the opposite wall. Finding nothing there of interest, she scanned the room again, saw the gumball machine and walked slowly up to it. She filled her cheeks with air and then blew out, turning her head askew to look at the clear bulb atop the machine. Gently, she patted each side of the glass, as she does to my face when I’ve given her instructions she doesn’t plan to follow. Then, as though it had just occurred to her there were still other people in the room, she looked over her shoulder at me, pointed to the glass bulb and said, “Balls.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But you’re not getting one.” Even if one of them fit in her mouth, she wouldn’t know how to work it into something malleable. Still, I walked over to be closer to her, thinking I could minimize the choking hazard for her.
I heard footsteps behind me, followed by a heavy sigh.
“Oh shit,” Hopkins said. “I’ve got a quarter if she wants one of them.”
I turned and looked at him, putting a hand, preemptive and loose, on the top of Fay’s head. “She doesn’t need one, Hopkins. The thing says it’s 35 cents anyway. Way to make it real convenient,” I said, turning back to my daughter.
“It’s got slots for both. I’d offer you the dime too, but you obviously. . . .” He trailed off.
I looked back at him again, his elbows on the otherwise empty front counter, rubbing a hand across his beard. His other hand hovered right over the counter’s surface, and he looked like he wasn’t sure whether he was playing it with his fingers like a piano, or slapping it with his palm. I’d seen him hungover plenty of times and assumed his body was playing a trick on him as a byproduct of that.
“Weren’t you bringing our stuff out?” I asked, as I corralled Fay slowly back to the counter, sounding more like an uptight restaurant patron than I’d meant.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought I said already. Warren’s got it half loaded up in the truck for you.” Warren was a high school kid who worked here instead of bothering himself with something mundane like perfect attendance. Hopkins encouraged his truancy, paid him enough while overlooking his occasional incompetence to assure him of an ascending career at the co-op. His dad owned the pizza place over on Forest Avenue and shared Hopkins’ ambivalence about Warren’s lack of structured education. The father probably had settled on the fact that for his son’s future, all roads led somewhere in town and no farther.
“That’s just the kind of customer service that keeps me coming back here,” I said.
“Let me go see how he’s doing,” Hopkins said and made his way into the back again.
As soon as he did, Fay dropped my hand and made directly for the gumball machine. She wrapped both hands around the support pole and started shaking it like she was strangling it. It didn’t budge at first, but in the few seconds of my getting over there, she’d gotten the iron feet rocking. I pulled her back by the arm, gentle but direct.
“Careful,” came Hopkins’ voice from behind me. “You’ll dislocate that little arm of hers.” I kept hold of her and put my other hand on my hip, sure I was conveying the right amount of annoyance with him. He kept going before I could say anything. “I’m just saying, because my mom did it to me when I was little. At the mall down near Madison. My dad did another time, too, I guess. It’s easier than you think.”
“Sounds like they were just lining up for a chance to yank your arm out of its socket, Hopkins,” I said. He shrugged, but he was also right. One time last year, just playing, Daniel swung Fay like a monkey till one of her arms went numb. It hung useless at her side for a couple hours. The doctor told us some kids needed to be treated gentler, which wasn’t helpful insight; nor did I think it generally relevant to Fay.
I took my hand off my hip and placed it on the cool top of the machine. I looked over at him, gave the glass ball a little shake and felt the machine wobble again.
“Damn, Elena,” he said, “what are you trying to do now?”
“Weren’t you in here? Fay almost knocked the whole thing over, Hopkins. Look at it.” I shook the top bulb again, but now that he was looking, of course it didn’t move.
“I didn’t see. What did she do? Body-check it?”
“No, she just grabbed it,” I said, “but it’s not doing it now. Either way, you should anchor it to the floor.”
“I’d have to, like, drill into the concrete.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s kind of the idea.”
“Can’t Fay just take it easy around there? Or you leave her home?”
“Hopkins!” He was the last person I would expect to share, let alone have, parenting insights.
“It’s just, no one’s ever come close to messing with that before.”
“That can’t be,” I said. “There’s kids in here all the time.”
“There are not.”
A yell came from the back, Warren calling to his boss for help. Hopkins slapped the counter again. It was, apparently, his Aloha of hand gestures. “What help?” he muttered. “He’s loading wood and a bale or two of wire into the back of a truck. How is he not done?” he said before disappearing into the back again.
He returned minutes later with a long roll of paper, like a biblical scroll.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Daniel asked if I’d mock up a blueprint to go along with the building materials.”
“For real?” I asked. He nodded in response. “Which one of you all used the word mock-up?”
“I think, him.”
“Well?” I nodded towards the counter. He pressed the paper roll flat against it. It was blank, save for a penciled rectangle in the center. No shading. No dimensions. No complicated joints and junctures. Just a fucking rectangle outline. My eyes narrowed as I looked.
“Get the fuck out of here, Hopkins,” I said as he dissolved into laughter. “Put that back in the back.”
“You have to at least let him see it,” he said. “He’ll think it’s funny.”
“He will not think it’s funny. He’ll think you think he’s a fucking idiot.”
“He’s the one who asked for it!” Hopkins shouted before slapping the drawing and convulsing anew.
People in town didn’t think Daniel, as a schoolteacher to their kids or grandkids, was an idiot, but they did think Daniel as a farmer or a landowner certainly was. I never knew this to be based on anything we had done or not done in the course of owning Blue Bluff Farm. The older crew—Uncle Tim’s age group—just had more time to pass judgment on our worthiness.
When Hopkins stopped laughing, I said, “Just get it out of here.”
He grabbed his phone from the counter and pointed it at the paper. “Can I at least text him a picture?”
“No! Put that away,” I said as I reached over, accidentally knocking his phone to the floor. It lay there for a moment before I picked it up and handed it back to him.
“He’s the one who asked,” Hopkins said again. “He’s going to want to see it!”
“I’ll just tell him it was impossible to confine your vision to the page,” I said. He sighed, rolled the blueprint up and stashed it behind the counter before moving to the back room.
I looked down at Fay, who was again eyeing the gumball machine. While she did that, I glanced over at the door, plotting an escape, possibly before our gear was all the way loaded into the truck. She wasn’t even being bad, but it wouldn’t be the first time her behavior—or the risk of it worsening—forced me to flee a public location and abandon an adult obligation prematurely. “Uh-uh,” I said, scooping her up and carrying her over to sit on the counter, positioning myself so she couldn’t jump off. Just then, the bell over the door rang behind me. It was Evert Peters. He had a small place across from us on the County Road and did odd work around town for whoever paid. Hell, we hired him for the miscellaneous handyman shit that neither Daniel nor I could quite manage. He filled the gaps with part-time maintenance work at the water parks up in the Dells.
He walked over, stood next to us at the counter and said, “I give up, which one of y’all did Hopkins hire to help out around here?” It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard him say, but I just nodded, lips pursed tight. I didn’t like when he was on our property working, and it turned out I didn’t like running into him here. I was sure he was one of the ones eager to get their hands on Blue Bluff when Uncle Tim first fell ill.
“He’s somewhere around, Evert,” I said. “Actually, surprised you didn’t see him out in the parking lot.”
Evert widened his eyes and gave his head a quick shake. He tugged at the brim of his cap, and the embroidered duck on it seemed to flinch in response.
“She want something from the machine?” he asked, nodding to Fay.
“You treating?”
He didn’t answer but changed topics. “What are you picking up today?” he asked. “More stuff for the garden?”
I looked at Evert. To him, it had always seemed like Blue Bluff, under our control, was a glorified garden, no longer a real farm. I struggled to think how I’d counter his argument. We had our share of raised planting beds and a family of goats that didn’t respect boundaries, but that was it. The chicken coop was the endeavor that would move us beyond that.
“We’re gonna do chickens,” I said. “Just getting what we need to build them somewhere to live.”
“That’s what Hopkins is busy with back there?”
I shrugged first, then nodded.
“Did you hear about him?” Peters asked. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“What did you hear?” I asked, knowing no one in town trusted Evert Peters with anything good. Just the things he could fix before we got around to it.
“He’s sick,” he said, nodding towards the back room. There was a crash, and a voice—distinctly Hopkins’—called out “Ah, fuck.”
“He seems fine to me,” I said, knowing I knew Hopkins too well to confidently say that.
“I heard Parkinson’s. He’s gotten two opinions and everything.”
“He told you?” I asked. My gaze hung on the doorway to the back while I kept the corner of my eye on Evert.
“Talked to his father. I mean, they ain’t making something like that up.”
“Fuck,” I sighed. “He’s my age. Too young.” Mortality wasn’t an alien thought by any means. I’d almost died, after all, during Fay’s delivery. But that, I knew, was an inherently risky situation. Hopkins hadn’t done anything to bring this on himself.
“Early onset, they call it. That’s a thing, right? You may not want to believe it, but it’s a thing.” Evert stopped and sniffed. “Don’t expect it to change much around here,” he continued, unsolicited. “He’ll just need more help. Maybe little missy here,” he nodded down at Fay, “can work here after all.” Evert noticed a small, open wooden crate behind the counter. “Speaking of help,” he said. He walked back, slid the crate back and forth, and stirred its contents—a weird metal pump—with his hands. “Hmm,” he said. “This is for me.” He looked up at me as though he might ask for permission. I gave a wave with my hand, which he took as his cue to leave with the little crate, the bell dinging his departure.
A minute or two later, Hopkins came back out and asked what he’d missed.
“Evert,” I said.
“Evert Peters was here?” he asked. I nodded. He looked at the back counter, now empty. “And he just took the thing?” I nodded. “Did he leave money?”
“Hopkins, I don’t work here,” I said, though, between him and Evert, I was starting to feel like I’d been hired part-time without ever applying.
“But you should know, he doesn’t get shit for free.” He sighed, raising his hands to either side of his head and shaking them a few times. I leaned in, now intent to know how voluntary a gesture it was.
“We get free shit all the time. I figured you had the same arrangement with him.” I knew he was pissed at Evert, not me, but I was the only one here to absorb his reaction.
“Naw, man, his credit is no good.” He sighed. “Not . . . not your fault.”
I rolled my eyes, granting Hopkins the delusion that this place had any kind of system, lines of credit, or financial order. “It’s not like he won’t be back here tomorrow. Or at the Lookout.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Anyway, did I say I got Warren all straightened out?” He picked a quarter and dime off the counter and rubbed them together between finger and thumb. “Last chance for a treat for her. I’m sorry if I said anything earlier that sounded like your parenting wasn’t top notch.”
I frowned, unsure this was an apology. But it was Hopkins; it was as close as I’d get. Before I could say anything, his finger yielded, weak, like a kid trying to teach himself to snap, and the coins shot out. The quarter rolled off the counter, bounced high, then rolled along the shiny concrete, settling under the football helmet dispenser. “I got it,” he said as he crossed the room. He bent to one knee, bucked halfway back up, then tried to force himself down to his intended position. His other leg shot out, working completely independent of his nervous system, kicking the gumball machine. It teetered back, leaning diagonal against the wall. I could hear him sigh in relief that it hadn’t broken. But before he could get himself upright, it slid to the side, away from his outstretched arm, down the cinder block wall, smashed into the floor, finishing the job. I lifted Fay to stand on the counter, even though we were far enough away to be clear of broken glass. I don’t remember the impact making a sound, maybe just a whisper like paper crumpling. But the gumballs.
Fireworks always disappoint. The occasion never matters. The colors seem muted. The noises are louder where you don’t want them to be and muffled the times you’ve braced yourself. The gumballs exploded from their shattered encasement in a way I never would have expected. The glass shards settled onto the floor, but the gumballs defied what physics I remembered from high school. This was an experiment for which I’d have made sure to keep eyes wide and sit front row.
The gumballs bounced off the floor, the walls, and each other. Hopkins had settled into a prone position on the floor, clear of the broken glass, from what I could tell. He craned his head up slightly, and it bobbed with every billiard clack of the gumballs. Over to his side, Fay danced in place on the counter, a two-year-old’s dance to a song with no words, and he laughed as she went.
“A million dollars, I’d have bet,” he said, pushing himself up onto his elbows, “it’d be her and not me to break the fucking thing.” Technically, he’d already apologized, but I still waited. Waited for him to say more, to give the excuse I now knew to be valid, clued in that his neurons would continue to misfire and fail him, so early. But he just started clapping the floor in time to Fay’s dumb dance, and I left it at that. ⬥
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