They looked at each other across sixty yards of frosted grass.
She put the phone in her coat pocket and went back into the house.
* * *
He told her at breakfast that he was going to Lewistown for parts. It was true in the sense that there were always parts. June ate her oatmeal with her eyes going back and forth between them like someone watching a tennis match on television, and when he got up from the table she said, "Can I come?" and he said not today, bug, you've got school, and Claire said nothing at all. He drove the bus route to the end of the county road behind the school bus and waited until June climbed on, waving at him through the back window, and then he turned the pickup west.
It was forty minutes to Lewistown on the highway that ran through Grass Range and past the Forest Grove turnoff and over the long rolling benches where the wheat stubble glowed gold in the low sun. He drove it with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. He went first to the NAPA store and bought a fuel filter and a set of hydraulic hose ends that he did not need, so that it would be true, and then he drove two blocks to the bank.
He did not know exactly what he was going to say. He had a loan payment due on the operating note in November, and he had questions about the interest rate on the new line, and that would do. He parked on Main Street and went in through the heavy glass doors and asked the girl at the front desk if Dan Albright had a minute, and she smiled and said she'd check.
Dan came out of his office with his hand already extended. He was forty or so, trim, with a good haircut and a quarter-zip pullover with the bank's logo stitched on the chest, and a wedding-ring tan line that had faded mostly away in the two years since his wife moved to Bozeman. He grew up in Lewistown, played basketball for the Golden Eagles, went to Montana State for ag business, and came home, and everybody liked him. Wade had liked him. He shook his hand now and felt nothing he could name.
"Wade. Good to see you. How was Billings? I heard steers were strong."