Dean kept staring at her.
“Now, don’t go getting your hopes up,” Ma said. “Might be he won’t come. Could be he can even sell the farm out from under us, all the way from California. There’s no telling. But if he’s anything like the man I remember, I think he’ll come see. I asked him real nice, and that’ll count for something.”
“I decided to go with you last night,” Dean said, because it was the only thing he could manage. “Thank you” seemed far too small.
“Well, that’s really nice of you. Might be it comes to that, in the end.”
He nodded. “Whatever happens, I reckon we’ll manage.”
“We always do, don’t we?” Ma said, and went back to her packing.
Valerie Hunter is a high school English teacher in New Jersey, USA, and has had stories published in magazines and journals including Cicada, Colp, and Storyteller.
I enjoyed this story very much. I relate to it in a variety of ways, several of which are, tangential but my liking of it is real. I was raised in Nebraska, though on a farm. I’ve had, indeed I have, decisions pushed on me by circumstance, that seem to have no “proper” choice: some gain, some loss with any decision. I’ve written a story, much, much different, with the same title, which is what got me to read yours. Turned out that, after reading yours, I’ve realized that the two stories have much in common, in spite of their differences. Still, the core of my response to your story is, well done. It moved me.