“Not enough,” I said.
Iris spoke up.
“I have $280 in my account. Savings for nursing school. I can use that.”
“Absolutely not,” Grandma said. “That’s your future.”
“I’ll quit school,” I said. “Get a job. Pay it back.”
“No,” Grandpa said firmly. “You made the mistake, but we don’t sacrifice your education for it.”
I sat there feeling like the weight of everyone’s disappointment might crush me into the floor.
Saturday morning, Mrs. Finch’s truck pulled into our driveway.
She got out carrying an envelope.
Inside our kitchen, she set the envelope on the table.
Five hundred dollars.
“Dotty, we can’t accept this,” Grandma said.
“Yes, you can.”
“This is too much.”
“This is money Goldie earned working for me over the past two years. I’ve been saving it for her. Consider it an advance on future wages.”
“But that’s your money.”
“No. It’s hers. She worked for it. Now she’s paying for her education.”
Mrs. Finch looked at me directly.
“But there’s a condition. You take this money, you commit to learning properly. No more shortcuts. No more assumptions. You study, you practice, you listen to people with more experience. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you pay me back. Not in dollars. In becoming the best mechanic in this county.”
I took the envelope with shaking hands.
It felt heavier than paper should.
We paid Virgil Brennan that afternoon.
He accepted the money without comment, but his eyes, when he looked at me, carried something that wasn’t quite forgiveness.
Over the next three months, I learned more from failure than I ever had from success.
Grandpa and Mrs. Finch taught me properly.
Slowly.
Every machine got treated as unique.
Every assumption got questioned.
Every shortcut got called out.
I fixed Virgil’s tractor correctly, refusing payment.
He thawed slightly and eventually sent another customer my way with the grudging recommendation that I was careful now, thorough, and could be trusted.
Word spread slowly.
I wasn’t the miracle girl mechanic.
I was the girl who’d made a massive mistake and learned from it.
That was better anyway.
More honest.
Our John Deere kept running strong.
The modifications held up through harvest season, through winter, through another planting cycle.
The extra power let us finish work faster, take on some custom work for neighbors, and earn money that slowly pulled us away from the edge of financial collapse.
By late November, we’d saved enough to make the first major payment on the extended bank loan.
The farm was still standing.
That would have to be enough for now.
Christmas 1968 arrived with snow that turned the Kansas fields into blank pages.
The farmhouse smelled like Grandma’s gingerbread and the pine tree Grandpa and I had cut from the back forty.
Iris came home for three days, her nursing uniform replaced with a red sweater that made her look younger than twenty.
We gathered in the living room after dinner, the tree lights casting colored shadows across the walls.
Grandpa handed me a package wrapped in brown paper and twine.
Heavier than it looked.
“Open it.”
Inside was a toolbox.