Fiction Friday: The Farmers’ Sons Chapter 2 Part 2

I can’t seem to find where I posted this section of Chapter 2. If it is a repeat, I apologize. If not, then you have a little more information here about Ellie’s background especially.

For anyone new here, I post a piece of fiction or a serial story I am working on each Friday. The excerpt is a work in progress and will go through various drafts and rewrites before I publish it anywhere in the future.

To follow along with The Farmers’ Sons click HERE, or find the link at the top of the page.

Chapter 2 Part 2

Hair pulled back. Check.

Slacks with no scuff marks and no wrinkles. Check.

New shirt, freshly ironed. Check.

Ellie sighed, looking at herself in the entryway mirror at the preschool. She had no idea why she felt the need to be so well dressed for a group of 4 and 5-year-olds. Maybe she really was uptight, like her sister always said. Uptight, snooty, too-perfect, or whatever negative term Judi could describe her to prove that Judi was the fun sister and Ellie was the boring one.

She sighed again, sliding a beret in place to hold back a stray strand of hair.

That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t likely Judi was trying to prove anything about their differences. She probably didn’t even care; the same way she didn’t care about most things.

 It was Ellie who was stuck on the fact that Judi had always been more carefree, while Ellie felt like she had been born a little old lady. A little old lady who made lists planning out her life, organized her books in alphabetical order, and who’s clothes were hung by style and color coordination in her closet.

She tightened her ponytail, cocking an eyebrow as she inspected her shirt again and touched up her lipstick. It was the same color of lipstick she’d worn the night Jason had proposed to her.

The night her life had gotten back on track and she’d been able to write, “marriage and children” back onto that list she’d written out in high school.

 “Hi, Miss Ellie!”

She looked down into bright green eyes under a shock of red hair. “Hey, there, Timmy.” She leaned forward on knees slightly bent to bring herself down more to Timmy Murray’s level. “How are you this morning?”

“Mommy says I’m constipated.”

“Oh.” Ellie made a face. “Well, that’s not very good. Is your belly hurting?”

Timmy shrugged. “Nope. Just can’t poop. What are we doing at playtime today?”

Ellie held a laugh back. She didn’t want Timmy to think it was funny he couldn’t “poop.”

“It’s a surprise. You’ll have to wait and see.”

Timmy rolled his eyes. “Why do big people always make us wait for everythin’?”

Once again Ellie marveled at the verbal capability of this particular 4-year-old as she took his hand and led him into the classroom.

“Timmy, there you are.”

Ellie’s friend and co-worker Lucy Allen patted the table in front of Timmy’s chair. “Remember, we don’t leave the room unless we’re given permission.”

“I saw Miss Ellie and thought I should say ‘hello’.”

Lucy winked at Ellie, flipping strands of red-blond hair over her shoulder.

“You still need to ask permission, bud. Okay, let’s all get into our good morning circle to share about our weekend and then Miss Ellie will read us a new book, ‘Sleep, Big Bear, Sleep.’”

Lucy sighed as the children filed from their chairs and gathered on the rug.

“Welcome back from the weekend, Miss Ellie.” She wore a weary smile as she leaned back against the edge of the desk. “Was it a good one?”

Ellie placed her bag on the desk and took a sip of the tea in her mug. A mix of honey and lemon hit her taste buds. She wished she could tell Lucy how good her weekend really had been.  “It was. Yours?”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Long. My mother-in-law came to visit. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love Margaret, but everything is thrown off when she’s there. The kids don’t want to go to bed, she bakes all these cookies and they’re all on a sugar high . . .”

The kids.

Ellie’s chest constricted.

She’d gotten used to her friends talking about their children, but today it only seemed to highlight the fact she was the only one of her friends who didn’t have children to talk about. Well, there was Molly, of course, but she didn’t talk to Molly about children much, or her hope for them. Talking to her boyfriend’s sister about wanting to have babies with her brother would be awkward all around.

 “…but it was a nice weekend overall. Mary Anne went home this morning and I have to admit that it is a little lonely without her. The kids loved her bedtime stories. . . Hey, you okay?”

Ellie looked up, reaching across the desk for the book. Time to change the subject before Lucy asked too many questions about her weekend. “I am, but if I don’t start reading soon, those kids are going to get themselves into even more trouble.” She winked and gently nudged Lucy’s arm on her way to the center of the room.

“Brittany, hands to yourself. No, I don’t care if Matthew sat in your spot. Choose another spot.”

She sat herself in the chair in front of the kids and opened the book. “So, everyone, are we ready for a new book with a new character? A loveable bear I have a feeling is going to become a favorite.”

“Yeah!” All their little voices blended together.

“Okay, well, this story starts — ”

“Miss Ellie?”

A sigh. “Yes, Timmy?”

“How come you aren’t married?”

A catch in her chest. “Timmy, honey, it’s story time, not question-and-answer time.”

“My mommy says you’re old enough to be married, but you aren’t.”

A tightening jaw. “Well, Timmy, your mommy —“

Lucy cleared her throat and clapped her hands quickly. “Let’s focus on story time, Timmy, okay?”

Ellie shot Lucy a grateful smile. She really hadn’t been sure what was going to come out of her mouth. She looked at Timmy and winked again.

“I’m sure Timmy understands it’s time to use our ears for listening and not our mouth for talking now. Right, Timmy?”

Timmy nodded and stuck his thumb in his mouth, eyes wide.

Ellie took a deep breath and plunged forward with the book, hoping to make it through the day without verbally snapping any of these poor children’s heads off. It wasn’t their fault she was an almost 30-year-old woman who wasn’t married, didn’t have children, and hadn’t told her fiancé that they might never even have those children.

Lucy cornered her at lunchtime.

“That question from Timmy seemed to unsettle you a little. You okay?”

She nodded, tucking her shirt in, and brushing crumbs left over from her sandwich off the tabletop and into her hand.

“I am. Or will be.”

“Still no proposal?”

She hesitated, not wanting to lie to Lucy but also not wanting to break her agreement with Jason not to tell anyone until he gave her a ring.

Lucy leaned close. “Ellie Lambert, I can see it all over your face. Something happened this weekend. You’re not going to leave me in the dark, are you? Your very best friend in the whole wide world besides Trudy, who doesn’t count since she abandoned us.”

Ellie sipped her lemon water and laughed. “Trudy didn’t abandon us. She got married. It wasn’t her fault Brett got transferred to Detroit.”

Lucy rolled her eyes, popping the last bite of her carrot in her mouth. “It was more like she was sentenced to Detroit. Anyhow, what happened this weekend? Hurry.” She nodded toward the children giggling at their lunch table a few feet away. “The natives are getting restless.”

Ellie poured the crumbs into the waste basket behind her desk. “I never thought it would take Jason so long to propose and I thought I’d be so excited when it happened, but now — I don’t know. It was just  —”

“Wait. He proposed? This weekend!” Lucy leaned over and hugged her. “How did he do it? Did he get down on one knee?”

“No. We were in his truck. He was driving and —”

He proposed while he was driving?

“Well, sort of. He — well, I —”

Ellie’s face flushed. “I cornered him and asked him when he was going to marry me.”

Lucy snorted a laugh, almost spitting out her lemonade. “That’s one way to get the ring, I guess.”

Ellie lowered her voice even more. “The thing is, he didn’t even have a ring. I ambushed the poor guy.”

“But, he did propose right?”

“He said he was going to that night.”

“Then why didn’t he have a ring?”

Ellie sat back, pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, and released it again. “I — I don’t know. He said he hadn’t had a chance to get it yet, or something. I don’t remember. I was just so excited and he seemed happy so . . .”

Lucy loaded the remainder of her lunch in her bag. “He seemed happy or terrified?”

Ellie laughed softly and shook her head, placing her lunch bag by her purse. “Happy, Lucy. Really.”

“Miss Ellie, Brenda says her booger is bigger than mine. Make her stop.”

Without turning around Ellie pressed her hand against her eyes, the other hand on her hip. “Lucy, is Timmy holding a booger on his finger right now?”

The sharp intake of breath alerted Ellie to the answer before Lucy even said the words. “Unfortunately, yes.”

The rest of the conversation about the proposal would have to wait until later. Ellie reached for a handful of tissues and turned to address the Great Booger Debate, a smile tugging at her mouth.

***

Bright sunlight cut through the clouds, sending sparkles of light dancing across the dew blanketing the ground. Jason looked out over the field, sweat trickling down the back of his neck. His dad was already out, cutting a path through the field on the tractor, preparing the ground for another round of corn to be planted.

Tanner Enterprises was definitely a family-run business and the burden of keeping it running wasn’t all on his shoulders, but Jason still felt the weight of helping to run a 400-acre farm and an out branch of businesses which employed a staff of 50.

 Watching his dad, Jason knew Robert Tanner was tired. He’d been tired for a long time, but this was a different kind of tired. A tired that Jason could see was leaving the 49-year-old man physically and emotionally drained at the end of each day. Jason knew his dad was angry at himself for having taken a loan out against the family business without telling his family and even angrier that circumstances beyond his control had made it impossible to repay the loan by the deadline. The mere fact he’d had to take a loan at all was like a kick to the gut for Robert.

“I don’t know Jason. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to take out that loan if we hadn’t lost your grandfather.”

But Jason had a feeling the need for a loan would have come, even if Ned Tanner had lived longer. It had been a year since Jason’s grandfather had passed away. Really, though, the dementia had taken Ned Tanner away from his family several years before his soul actually left his body.

Jason could still see the faraway look in his grandfather’s eyes that one day five years ago when he’d asked him where the accounting books were. Robert and Walt had already taken over the business, but Ned had the financial records at his house and Robert had asked Jason to pick them up. The records had always been there, and the family had agreed when the brothers took over that Ned would continue to keep them in his filing cabinet in his office in the house. When Jason had asked for the books to take to the tax preparer, though, his grandfather had drawn a blank.

“Accounting books? Doesn’t Hannah have those?”

“No, Grandpa. We agreed you’d keep them in the filing cabinet.”

“I have a filing cabinet?”

Jason had laughed softly. “Very funny, Grandpa.”

He could tell from his grandfather’s expression, though, that he wasn’t joking. Ned looked genuinely confused.

“What books should I have again?”

Jason’s eyebrows had furrowed in concern. Did his grandfather really not remember where he’d always kept the books?

Within a few moments, though, it was as if the fog in Ned’s mind had lifted. “Oh. Yes. The accounting books. They’re in the third drawer of that green filing cabinet in the corner of the office upstairs. The key is in my sock drawer. I’ll get it for you this afternoon.”

Jason had felt some relief at the return of clarity, but a couple of months later Ned had forgotten other things, small at first, like where he’d left his keys or if he’d gassed up the tractor. Eventually, though, he’d sat longer on a hay bale in the barn or on a chair on Robert’s front porch, staring out at the fields, trying to remember what he’d been about to do. The day Robert drove him home, tired and near tears because he couldn’t remember which direction to turn his truck to get back to his house, it was clear something was seriously wrong.

“Alzheimer’s.”

The doctor’s diagnosis hit the family hard. Jason could still remember clearly the small gasp from his mother, the way her hand flew to her mouth, pressed there for several moments as tears rimmed her eyes when Robert had told her.

Robert had told Jason that Franny, Jason’s grandmother, had asked the doctor, “How long?”

“How long?” The doctor looked at her in confusion.

“How long before he’s completely lost to us?”

The doctor hadn’t felt the dementia would move fast, but it did. Faster than anyone expected. The worsening heart failure had moved even faster, and within three years of the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Ned had been gone.

If it hadn’t been for his desire to keep his father’s dream alive, Robert might have given up and walked away from farming altogether the day they’d buried Ned in the family plot in the small cemetery behind the now empty country church down the road. The fact Jason and Molly, Walt and his family still had a passion for the farm had helped keep him going, but the other day Jason had seen his father looking at the letter from the bank he’d stuffed in his back pocket. Jason had looked over his dad’s shoulder and Robert had shared the news with him about the danger the business was in.

Both of them had felt the heaviness of grief again–grief over the loss of Ned, but also the pending grief at failing at the only job either of them had ever had and ever wanted to do.

Jason watched his dad turn the tractor back toward the barn and then turned back toward the barn to complete his own morning work so he could take off to the gym, one of the few places where he could work out his stresses.

“Hey, Jase?” He looked up at the sound of his dad’s voice after the tractor had been parked. Robert was standing next to the tractor, one arm propped against it.

The pig nudged the bottom of the bucket in Jason’s hand and snorted in impatience. “Yeah?”

“You have a lot on your mind lately?”

Jason shrugged a shoulder and tilted the bucket, some of the slop landing on the pig’s head, the rest on in the trough. “Uh. No. Not really. I mean,” he slid his cap back, scratched his head, and pulled the cap back down again. “Why?”

“You were supposed to tighten the bolts on these tires the morning.”

 “Oh.” Jason made a face. “Yeah. Right.”

“Right. Luckily, I could feel they were loose before I got too far out this morning.”

Jason cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry about that.”

Robert shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I’m not mad, but you’ve seemed a little distracted lately. Is there anything you need to talk about?

Jason shook his head. “Nope.” He rubbed dirt off his hand with a rag. “I guess my mind was on something else. I’ll be more careful in the future.”

Robert rubbed his chin, pondered his son for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, well, you let me know if you need to talk.”

Jason turned back to working on the feed machine. “Definitely.”

But no. He would not talk to his dad about what was on his mind.

It was bad enough he was going to have to tell Ellie at some point if he wanted to start their marriage on a path of honesty. The last thing he needed was having his dad, the man he’d looked up to his whole life, learn about his past mistakes as well.