"No," Judith said into the phone. "But I keep going out with him, and that’s steadier than what I had before."

About two weeks had passed since Chet Sorensen’s accident; in that time, Judy and Ken had gone together to see him in Geneva two or three times a week; followed by workouts at the YMCA. Usually they stopped for hamburgers afterwards, and twice they took in movies. In addition, while their last weeks in high school ran down, they usually managed to eat lunch together.

They weren’t the most thrilling dates she could imagine, but she was perfectly satisfied to be with Ken under those conditions, and happy that he could get free as much as he did. Still, it was nice for her to be able to cap off her high school career by having a boyfriend. Going out with Ken made her feel as if she were almost a normal girl and having a chance to compare her physical strength with Ken’s at the workouts had driven home to her that she really was not weak.

"Well, you two are beginning to look like it," Lori said. "Where have you been going with him?"

Judith described the movies, the hospital visits and the workouts at the YMCA. "He’s beginning to swim a little better, and we do weight training and stuff together," Judith explained.

Lori laughed. "And you’re the only girl in school who never had problems avoiding Phys ed."

Judith smiled at the thought. "I always thought of my workouts as therapy, so I stuck with them whether I wanted to or not. But, I’ve been enjoying them, lately." She changed the subject. "I see you’re still going with Bob."

"We’ve been out a couple times since the prom," Lori admitted. "He’s not as bad a guy as people say. Did you know he plays the guitar and sings, real good?"

"I’ll be darned," Judith replied. She couldn’t imagine Bob singing. Most of the reason why people avoided Bob was that he had a speech impediment so bad he could barely talk, and therefore rarely did.

"He’s like Mel Tillis," Lori said. "He doesn’t stutter when he sings, and he knows some neat stuff I never heard before. The other night, he played some classical music I never heard of. He said it was by someone called Segovia. I’m not sure I liked it, but he can sure play it."

"Even when you know someone, you just don’t know, do you?" Judith reflected.

"You should talk."

"Well, yeah," Judith said. Lori’s implication was not lost on her, but she’d been surprising herself a little recently, too.

"So, anyway, Bob asked me to go to the class party after the graduation ceremony with him," Lori continued. "Are you and Ken going?"

"He hasn’t asked me yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me," Judith said.

"Come if you can. We’ve only got about two weeks of school left, and that’s probably the last time we’ll see some of these people we’ve grown up with."

"That’s true." Judith felt a little sense of loss. Even in a class as small as Willow Lake High School had that year – there would be forty-four graduates – where everyone was acquainted with everyone else, Judy had developed few friends: Lori, and to a lesser extent, Alison and Candy. And now, Ken. But her classmates were kind of a family she had watched, and Judith knew she would miss the comfort of being surrounded by people she at least knew. "I’ll miss them," she agreed.

"I’m going to miss seeing how some of these soap operas turn out." Lori sounded a little down to Judith.

"Oh, in a town like this, we’ll hear enough gossip to keep us in touch," Judith protested.

"Yeah, but people will drift away, and we’ll never hear about them again. There’ll always be things we’ll wonder about. Like, does Keith Worden get rich without going to jail?"

"Or, do Alison and Phil get serious?" Judith agreed.

"Yeah, or does Jennifer Savage become a movie star or a high-class prostitute?" Lori laughed.

With his father in the hospital, Ken was needed even more than ever on the farm during the height of the planting season. Even Ken and Judy’s after-school dates had to end early, so he could go back out to the farm and run a tractor until long after dark, trying to keep up his share of the load. Judy understood the need and wasn’t complaining.

At that, Ken was used to having his after-school time taken up with farm work. While he bounced along on a tractor spraying an immense cornfield, Ken thought about what he’d rather be doing. Right now, it was to be with Judy, but not long before, he’d rather have been playing baseball. Like many farm boys in small schools, Ken would have liked to have been on the baseball team, but there was too much farm work in the spring; football was out in the fall, for the same reason.

In his high school years, Ken had thought that he should go out for some sport, just to stay a part of the school activities. Basketball was really the only major sport open to him. He’d made the team each of the four years he’d been in high school, though he didn’t particularly care for the game, and wasn’t good enough to be a first-string player.

Ken had long ago decided he didn’t want to be a farmer. He had made this decision partly because he wanted to do something else with his life – though he still wasn’t sure what – and partly because he knew that his older brother was already set to take over the farm in a few years, and there wasn’t enough income from the farm for the two of them.

Besides, Ken knew that if he went into farming, he’d continually be following Tom’s decisions. He’d had enough of that.

In the back of his mind, Ken thought he might be able to get some sort of a job where his farm background could be of use to him, but that wasn’t much more than a vague thought. He knew he might not do even that. Prospects for a good job were better in a town the size of Camden, he knew, though he doubted he’d like to live there. It wouldn’t be as nice as the country to bring up a family, though that was off in the future.

That line of reasoning led him right back to thinking about Judy. He’d been out with other girls while he had been in high school, and was now coming to realize that he really liked her. He’d known her for years, of course, but the past two or three weeks, he had known the joy of discovering something wonderful and totally unexpected under her shy and retiring surface. She’d proved to be a lot more fun than he’d expected her to be.

But did she fit into his future? Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine spending his life with her. Despite her hopes, it seemed pretty likely that she was going to be a lifelong cripple, and it couldn’t help but make long-range thinking unappealing.

Ken looked back at the sight gauge on the spray tank; with his experience, he knew he had enough for one more pass before he had to refill it.

On the other hand, Judy being crippled had given her some very appealing qualities. He’d never recognized it before he started going with her, but her ordeal had made her a very strong and mature girl. She was determined, and she had proved that she could act if something needed to be done. Compared to his scatterbrained sister-in-law Carolyn, she was a model of competence. And yes, she was fun to be with.

But was it fair to keep going out with her when he didn’t know how he felt about her? For instance, there was the graduation party coming up. Maybe he ought to tail things off until he figured out how he felt.

Ken cut off the spray and drove over to the thousand-gallon tank parked next to the road. Tom had mixed the spray earlier that afternoon, and Ken wasn’t totally sure what was in it. It was a mixture of both grass and broadleaf herbicides, as well as an insecticide, judging by the pile of empty bottles and jugs in the farmyard; apparently Tom wanted to kill everything in the field but the recently planted corn.

Ken stuck a hose into the spray tank, then started a pump to transfer the evil-smelling mixture. It only took about five minutes to fill the tank on the sprayer with about 250 gallons of spray. He checked the sight gauge on the big tank; one fill after this, then they’d have to mix more. He checked his watch and realized that would be about suppertime, then climbed back up on the tractor, still thinking about Judy.

Of course it was fair to continue with her, he realized. Wasn’t dating supposed to be to give you a chance to figure out how you feel about someone?

Ken looked at his watch again and made up his mind. Another hour, and then he’d call Judy and ask her about the graduation party.

Though the cafeteria was smaller, the school board had decided to move the graduation ceremonies there from the gym, which had gotten so old and tattered that they didn’t want to let it be seen more than necessary. Besides, with a class this small, the crowd expected wouldn’t fill the gym anyway. Using the smaller room would make the ceremony seem more important. For the ceremony a stage had been installed at one end of the room; it was about three steps above the cafeteria floor and large enough to hold the whole class along with the functionaries.

The size of the crowd on the warm June night made the room seen like an oven, especially to the graduating seniors, including Ken and Judy in their caps and gowns.

As the Willow Lake High School Band, minus the seniors, struggled with "Pomp and Circumstance," there were many parents with mixed emotions in the cafeteria, happiness that their offspring had finished this big step in their lives, but sad that many of those offspring would be taking wing and flying out of their lives, off to create lives of their own.

Chet Sorensen wasn’t well enough to be home from the hospital on a regular basis, but his doctors had decided he could leave for a few hours to attend this ceremony. He sat propped up in a wheelchair, looking uncomfortable with his leg in a heavy cast. He smiled and held his wife’s hand tightly as Ken came down the aisle. Ken had proved to be a good son. He had his own mind, but he wasn’t the type to cheat or steal or hurt anyone. While his grades hadn’t been spectacular, they had been good enough, Chet thought. All in all, he was pleased at the moment.

Chet smiled again when he saw Judy going down the aisle on her crutches. There’s another good kid, he thought. Her parents must be proud of her tonight.

A few chairs away, Norman and Irene Niven sat watching their Judith slowly negotiate the steps to the stage. "We shouldn’t have let her come," Irene whispered. "Look at her! She’s going to fall!"

"No, she’s not," Norman whispered back. "You wouldn’t deny her the thrill of graduating with her friends, would you?"

Irene didn’t answer, but Norman already knew her feelings. He knew Irene would have kept Judith home if both he and his daughter hadn’t insisted on her being here. He sat back, watching with pride as Judith took her seat; his little girl had gone through so much to get here that he couldn’t help letting the tears roll down his cheeks.

Norman was glad the Sorensen boy had taken an interest in Judith. In all the pain-filled years she had spent struggling back from the accident, Judith had often seemed like a pathetic little girl with no future, but these past few weeks she had seemed happier than Norman had seen her in years.

Judith would never have made it this far, Norman knew, if it hadn’t been for all the devoted attention Irene had given her in the first years after the accident. Yet, as Judith grew stronger, it seemed to him that Irene was stifling their daughter, and he wasn’t too sure he liked it. Irene’s contention was that there was a limit to what Judith could do, and that she would have to be cared for by someone more or less perpetually.

Norman wasn’t too sure about that. Even though Irene disagreed, he wanted to believe that his daughter had more of a future than being a housebound cripple. "You made it this far," he had told his daughter earlier that evening. "I know you can do just about anything you set your mind to."

Like any other graduation speech, the speaker was someone no one in the graduating class of Willow Lake High School had ever heard of before, and his speech seemed to last forever in the humid atmosphere of the room. Finally, the tepid syllables drew to a close, and one by one, the graduates were called to receive their diplomas.

In but a few minutes it was over, and the graduates and the crowd clustered outside in the cool of the evening. "Look, Dad, I did it!" Judith said, proudly displaying the piece of paper.

Norman gave his daughter a big hug. "Yes, you did," he said. "You can’t imagine how happy your mother and I are for you."

"You did very well," Irene said. "You won’t have to work so hard, now."

Judith turned to give her mother a hug, too. "Oh, Mums," she said, "I’m so happy."

"That must have tired you all out," Irene said. "Are you sure you still want to go to that party?"

"I’m not tired at all," Judy said. "I don’t want to miss the party. I’ll be home early."

In contrast to the stiff, artificial formality of the prom, the graduation party was so relaxed that it hardly seemed organized at all.

The class had rented the Willow Lake American Legion Hall for their last party together. Everyone was both joyful and a bit sad at having their high school years over with, but they were in a party mood.

At any given time, up to half the class was out in the parking lot enjoying themselves in couples and larger groups. There were several bottles circulating around discreetly, and Keith Worden passed around some marijuana he had grown on his own secret pot plantation. In several of the parked cars, some heavy petting -- and more – went on before the evening was over.

Inside the building, things were rather more reserved. There was a jukebox, rented for the occasion, and it ran steadily at maximum volume before the supply of change began to run low.

Judy and Ken sat with Bob Watson and Lori Mattson at a table, trying to talk over the noise of the jukebox. After almost an hour, any fun there was in that began to disappear, but Lori had a way to make things interesting. "Go get your guitar, Bob," she told her date.

The four of them gathered on the steps of the Legion Hall while Bob tuned his acoustic guitar; two or three other classmates drifted over to laugh.

Any possibility of laughter stopped as Bob swung into the guitar version of Orange Blossom Special. It didn’t take any knowledge of music to know that Bob was playing the guitar, not just strumming it. His fingers fairly flew over the strings.

Bob finished the song, flexed his fingers a bit to let the smoke roll off them, and said, "I-I-I-I-I-I’ll d-d-d-d-do s-s-s-s-s-some-th-th-thing s-s-s-sim-p-p-ple."

"Something simple" proved to be the old Beach Boys classic, California Girls. As Bob swung into the opening line, "Well, East Coast girls are hip, I really dig those styles they wear," Judy noticed that he wasn’t stuttering at all.

At least she had been warned. Ken knew of his friend’s singing, but even in a small town like Willow Lake, few others did; it wasn’t the sort of thing Bob had been willing to do in public until Lori pushed him into it.

The crowd kept Bob singing for more than an hour, and his range proved to be amazing. He could mimic Willie Nelson singing On The Road Again as easily as he could mimic Elvis singingJailhouse Rock, and he could crank out a great deal in between, with never a stutter or a stammer.

It began to get uncomfortably cool outside, and Bob needed a break. Finally, he said shyly, "I-I-I-I-’ll d-d-d-do m-m-m-m-m-more l-l-l-later if y-y-y-you w-w-w-want," then picked his guitar up and went inside, Lori gently holding his arm.

Judy put her arm around Ken and snuggled up next to him. "You never know, do you?" she said quietly.

Ken put his arm around her shoulders and murmured, "I’m learning that."

Judy had hoped to see more of Ken once they were out of school, but it actually proved to be a little less. Their school lunches were now a thing of the past, and Ken was even busier on the farm. Despite working late into the evenings, Tom and Ken were still well behind schedule in getting corn in. What usually was a little break after the corn was planted was filled in with catching up on other areas.

Ken still took Judy to her workouts in Geneva when he could, but sometimes the press of farm work was just too much for him.

Not long before, Judy would have been content to spend the lazy late spring days working on her suntan, reading or watching television, but now none of those things held her interest very well; she yearned to be doing something more active, and looked forward to each time she would be seeing Ken.

About ten days after graduation, she was disappointed to get a call from Ken saying that he wouldn’t be able to take her for her workout the next day, as he had hoped. "We’ve got to bale hay tomorrow, and with Dad still in the hospital, we’re going to be even more shorthanded than ever."

"Darn," she said. "I was looking forward to seeing you."

"Well, not much we can do about it," he said, "unless you want to come out and watch me sweat."

"Sure," she answered quickly. "I’m getting so tired of sitting around I’d like to watch any kind of activity."

Irene put up her anticipated protest, but even she had seen that Judy was more bored than normal, and a trip to the farm would give her a little diversion, if she would at least stay off Candybar.

The next morning, Judy took her swimsuit with her to Ken’s, expecting to get some more sunbathing in. She looked forward to spending more time around the farm. The only time she had been out there for any length of time had been when she rode Candybar, and what she had seen had been interesting. Willow Lake was a country town; many of her schoolmates had been from farm families, and her own father worked at the feed mill. Even so, Judy had never spent much time around farms, and much of what went on there was new to her.

It was still early when Ken picked her up and drove her out to the farm. They were met in the driveway by Ken’s mother. "Would you like some coffee, Judy?" she asked. "There’s still some warm."

Judy said it sounded good; it would give her time to talk with Ken’s mother for a minute, too.

"I’ll go see how Tom’s coming with the baler," Ken said, telling Judy that a universal joint had blown out of the drive shaft, and Tom had to wait to get parts before they could get going.

Lydia was easy to talk to, despite being three times Judy’s age. Judy was explaining some of the problems she had with her mother when the phone rang. While Lydia was on the phone, Ken came into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. "Tom’s not ready with the baler, yet," he reported.

Lydia was back a few minutes later. "That was good news," the older woman said. "They’re letting Chet out of the hospital later today."

"That’s good," Judy agreed. "I take it he’s still going to have that cast on."

"Oh, yes," said Lydia. "Probably for a couple of months, yet. He’s going to have a hard time sitting around and watching the boys work without being able to help . . . oh, dear."

"What’s the problem?" Ken asked.

"I just remembered. I promised Tom I’d drive the shuttle tractor for him. Now, I’m going to have to go pick up Chet."

Lydia usually didn’t join in on the majority of the farm work, but she was always ready to lend a hand when it was needed. Haying was an all-hands operation, with some people hired in to work for the day as well; now, they were going to be shorthanded again. "I’d better go tell Tom," she went on, "Unless maybe you could drive a tractor, Judy."

"No," Judy shook her head. "I’ve never driven anything. I can’t push the pedals."

"We could work around that," Ken said. "The ‘H’ has a hand brake, and I’ll bet I can rig up some sort of a hand lever for the clutch."

"But, Ken," Judy protested, "I don’t have time to learn how to drive a tractor right now."

"It’s not hard," Ken told her. "All you have to do is to take empty hay wagons out to where we’re baling, and bring full ones back. You can drive along nice and slow, and there’ll be someone at each end to help you change wagons."

"Can’t your sister-in-law help?" Judy asked.

"Naw," he said. "She claims hay gives her hay fever. She won’t even drive a tractor. She thinks farm work is beneath her."

"Ken, that’s not nice," his mother said, knowing that what he had said was the truth. "Judy, you could try it," she added. "I don’t have to leave for a while. If it doesn’t work out, maybe we can find someone else. But, it would surprise me if you can’t handle it."

"My mother will really be upset if she finds out," Judy said uncertainly. "But I don’t suppose it will hurt if I give it a try and if it works it will help you out."

Ken may not have wanted to be a farmer, but he had a farmer’s talent for cobbling up a modification to a piece of machinery to keep it going. "All right," he said to Judy as she sat uncertainly on the tractor seat. "This lever over here is the brake. These things have a really Mickey Mouse parking brake, so we rigged this up to do double duty. Got that?"

Judy nodded, and he went on. "Now, over here on your left," he said, "Is the clutch. Pull the lever toward you when you’re stopping or changing gears, and let it in real slowly when you start off. You’ve got a hand throttle up here, and you ought to be able to figure out the steering wheel."

Ken showed her how to start the engine, and, standing on the drawbar, guided her across the barnyard and down the lane to the front pasture, where there would be a little room to learn. Judy found driving the tractor to be easier than expected, although she had trouble learning how to handle the clutch. "Don’t worry about shifting gears," Ken advised. "This doesn’t shift too smoothly, anyway. Just put it into third, give it a lot of throttle and come up easy on the clutch when you’re loaded. When you have an empty, you can run it in fourth. You won’t need the low gears at all, and stay out of fifth until later, when we have to bring hay wagons from up the road."

Judy was running the "H" in fourth gear, and the farm lane seemed to be rushing past her. "How fast are we going?" she asked.

"Eight or ten miles an hour."

"It seems fast," she replied, amazed. They drove around the field for a few minutes. At first, Judy’s teeth were clenched as she struggled with the unfamiliar task, but after a while, she seemed more sure of herself.

Ken looked back at the barn, to see Tom driving the big John Deere 4630 toward the hayfield, towing the baler and a hay wagon. Dave Griswold, the son of a farmer a couple of miles up the road, was riding on the wagon. "Guess we better get started," he said. "Head back for the barn." Back in the barnyard, Ken coached Judy in how to back the tractor up to hitch onto a hay wagon. "You don’t have to be perfect," he said. "Just get close, be gentle on the clutch, and do what Dave or I tell you to do."

One thing concerned Judy. "I don’t want to be away from my crutches in case something goes wrong," she said. "Is there some way I can carry them on the tractor?"

"Sure," Ken said, disappearing into the machinery shed. He returned after a moment with a rubber tie down strap, and strapped her crutches to the headlight bar, just in front of the steering wheel. "Let’s get going," he said. "I’ll go with you this time, just to make sure you know what’s going on."

By the time they got out to the hayfield, Tom and Dave had the hay wagon half full. Ken told Judy to stop and wait. "You want to be close when they get the wagon full," he said. "Don’t be afraid to drive along behind them for a while until they get the last few bales on, but don’t drive across any windrows." Ken pointed at the long rows of hay the baler was picking up; it had been mowed earlier in the week, and raked up into the rows the day before.

Judy shook her head. "I don’t know if I can do all that, Ken."

"Sure you can," he answered her. "It’s simple. I was doing this when I was too little to throw hay bales around."

"How old were you when you started driving a tractor?" she asked, curious.

"Oh, I guess maybe I was eight or nine when I started."

Judy thought that when she was eight, she hadn’t been in the accident. How different their lives had been! "But you had some idea of what was going on," she said, trying to get her mind off of that depressing subject.

"There’s not much to it," Ken said. "Dave stacks the bales on the wagon when they come off of the bailer. When it’s full, you give them an empty and take the full one up to the barn."

In another few minutes, the wagon behind the baler was getting full. Ken had Judy drive up to change wagons. After he was done hooking the tractor to the loaded wagon, he got Dave over to the side for a minute and warned him that he would have to give Judy some help in backing up to hitch up.

She could feel the tractor working harder as it pulled the loaded hay wagon back up to the barn. When they were there, Ken had her pull the wagon up next to the elevator and stop. He pulled the pin to unhitch the tractor, and had her back up to another empty wagon. Ken’s mother came out of the house and up to Judy. "Here, you’d better get your hair up, or it’ll really be a mess," she warned, giving her some hairpins. As Judy started to wrap her long hair up, Lydia asked, "Do you think you can handle it?"

"I think so," Judy said, uncertainly.

"Would you like me to go with you for a trip or two?"

"Sure."

Still in her housedress and apron, Lydia stepped up onto the drawbar. "All right, let’s go," she said.

Lydia watched carefully as Judy drove down the lane. "You don’t have to go too fast if you don’t want to. Ken will drive too fast sometimes, especially loaded." Lydia showed Judy how to cross the dead furrows at the edge of the field at an angle, warned her not to even think about backing up while she was hitched to the wagon, and a few other little tricks that Ken had passed over. They talked for a few minutes while waiting for the baler, and then drove the load back up to the barn. By the time they got there, Ken had emptied the wagon from the earlier load, and had it pushed away from the elevator.

"Just a moment before you go back," Lydia said. She got off the tractor and went into the house for a minute, returning with a baseball-style hat with an ad for a seed company on the crown. "You’d better wear this," she told the girl. "You’re pretty tan, but you’re going to be out in the sun all day. You don’t want to burn your nose."

"Thanks," Judy said, putting the hat on and adjusting it.

"Now you really look like a farm girl," Lydia told her. "You’d better get going, or they’re going to have to wait with the baler for you."

"Aren’t you coming?" Judy asked, a little alarmed.

"No reason to," Lydia said. "Just take it easy. You’ll do all right. I’ve got to go inside and have some lunch ready before I go get Chet. You haven’t seen men eat until after you’ve seen them haying."

Judy spent the morning driving back and forth on the tractor, and soon realized that it was possible to spend a few minutes each trip watching Ken work. Judy saw how Ken unloaded the bales from the wagon, and then sent them up the elevator for Bob Watson and his older brother, Merle, to stack inside. Though it was still fairly cool, Ken was already sweating; she could see that throwing the heavy bales around was hard work. Occasionally, Bob or Merle would step outside for a breather while Ken switched wagons behind Judy’s tractor. Soon, it would be time for another trip to the field, and Hal, the old dog, would wake up from his slumber in the shade enough to chase Judy and the tractor and wagon for a few steps, then go back to the shade to sleep.

After a few trips to the field, Judy no longer felt apprehensive about driving the tractor; rather, she felt elated at the thought that she was contributing to the work. It was nice to be able to help out, and she was excited to discover that she had found something else that she could do, especially something as worthwhile as this.

The sun drew higher as Tom and Dave worked the old baler across the field. The big new tractor, Tom’s pride and joy, could handle the baler and wagon without working too hard, but it kept the loaded hay wagons coming fast. As they slowly worked their way farther from the barn, Judy found she had to drive more distance each trip, and had less time to spend watching Ken at the elevator. Finally, as the windrows of hay in the field were nearly gone, Tom stopped Judy at a wagon change. "We’re almost done," he told her. "We’ll bring this load up. Tell Mom we’ll be up for lunch soon."

After they changed wagons at the barn, Judy shut down the tractor and told Ken the last load was coming. "That’s good news," he said, wiping his brow. "I’m beat already. Have you had fun?"

"It’s not what you promised," she chided him as she unstrapped her crutches from the tractor, "But yes, it’s fun."

"Good," he said. "That’s about a third of it, or maybe a little more."

You’re getting pretty good with that tractor," Dave said. "You back right down on that hitch like you mean it."

Judy thanked him, a little embarrassed. She looked around at the table. In a short time, the four men and one boy had put away an impressive amount of food. Lydia was stacking dirty dishes in the dishwasher as Carolyn passed them to her.

"We got kind of a late start," Tom said, "But things are going real well. I’m glad we don’t bale that much hay anymore."

"You thinking of getting a new baler?" Merle asked.

"Naw, for as much as we bale, the old one will do," Tom conceded. "What we really need is a new combine and corn head. As much corn as we’ve got, we really could use it."

"Dad’s getting a new 7720," Dave said. He was a few years younger than Ken, Bob, and Judy, and wanted to make sure he was part of the conversation.

"That’s a nice machine," Tom said. As the conversation drifted off toward machinery topics Judy didn’t understand, she started to get up to pass dirty dishes to Carolyn.

"I can do it myself," the heavy-set, dark-haired woman snapped.

"Just trying to help," Judy said apologetically.

"Don’t bother yourself."

Judy shrugged and went outside. In a minute, Ken came out to join her, and she asked, "What got into your sister-in-law?"

"Oh, don’t mind her," Ken said. "She’s in a good mood today. You should see her when she gets mad."

"Why’s she so upset? I mean, I know you never have much good to say about her."

Ken shrugged. "I guess when she married Tom, she thought a farm life was a life of leisure. She’d read too many romances, I guess. When she found out she was expected to help out, she didn’t like it. I don’t know how Tom puts up with her."

"Well, I guess I understand," Judy said.

Ken shook his head. "Don’t get me wrong," he said. "You’re already more help around here than she is, and she knows it."

The haying that afternoon was done in a larger field, about a mile up the road from the Sorensen farmhouse, on a farm the men called, "The Johnson place." With a longer distance to go between the field and the barn, Judy had to run the tractor faster to keep up, but by now it seemed second nature. In spite of her tan and spreading suntan lotion, she was getting sunburned – but she was having a lot more fun today than she had expected.

Norman Niven usually worked in the office at the feed mill, a fairly large farm service business, dealing in fertilizer and machinery in addition to feed and grain storage. That afternoon, however, the man who normally made feed deliveries had a sick child to take to the doctor, so Norman took over the feed truck. There were others who could have done it, but it felt good to be out in the open on a nice day for once.

As he drove the heavy feed truck down Arvada Highway, he came up behind a slow-moving hay wagon. He hung there for a moment while he waited for oncoming traffic to get by, and then pulled out to pass.

As he passed the tractor, he glanced at the driver, noting that it was driven by a good-looking young girl he didn’t recognize. He looked in the rear-view mirror as he pulled back in. "That could almost be Judith," he thought for a moment, then said softly to himself, "Naw, it couldn’t be."

It was later in the afternoon when Mrs. Sorensen brought her husband home. He looked gray and haggard from his stay in the hospital, and was still confined to a wheelchair thanks to the heavy cast on his leg. The three people working on the elevator knocked off for a moment to help wrestle the wheelchair up the steps onto the porch. "Chet, do you want to go inside and rest?" his wife asked.

"I’ve had enough rest for a while," he replied gruffly. "Why don’t you park me here on the porch so I can watch what’s happening?"

Lydia could see it hurt her husband to have the haying going on around him and not be a part of it. "They’re getting along all right," she reassured him.

Just then, the old red Farmall pulled a hay wagon into the yard. "Who’s driving the ‘H’?" he asked.

"Oh, Judy’s driving it," Lydia said. "She’s been doing a good job, too."

"I didn’t know she could do that."

Lydia smiled. "Neither did she."

The last hay bale went up the elevator. When Ken saw one of the Watsons pick it up, he shut the elevator off. "That’s it, guys," he called.

"All right," Merle called back. "Beer time!"

Tom had already parked the baler in the machinery shed, and came walking out, a six-pack of cold beer in his hand. "After a day like today, nothing tastes better than an ice-cold beer," he said.

"I can dig it," Merle agreed as he and Bob walked out of the barn. Both of the Watsons were so dirty and sweaty that Judy could hardly recognize them. Tom tossed each of them a can, and Dave took one, too.

"Want one?" Tom asked, holding the can out to Judy.

"No, thank you," she said icily.

Tom offered the can to Ken. "I better not," Ken said, remembering how Judy had talked about drinking after the prom. "You know what I could stand, though?"

"What?"

"All afternoon," Ken replied, "I’ve been thinking about how nice it would feel to just go jump in the lake."

"You and swimming," Tom snorted. "You’re turning into a fish."

"G-g-g-good i-i-i-idea," Bob agreed.

Judy was thankful she’d brought her swimsuit after all. She went inside and changed while the beers were being finished, and soon two carloads of dirty, tired, haying crew were driving toward the lake.

There was a dock at the boat ramp where they swam, and Judy was able to set her crutches on it and ease herself into the lake. Once in the lake, however, she proved to be a better swimmer than anyone else there, and could handle herself in the inevitable splash wars. Though Judy swam a lot, she rarely swam in the lake, and the cool, fresh water felt good, especially after what really had been a tiring day – but a day that seemed very rewarding.

Eventually, everybody wound down; one by one, they came out of the lake, toweled off, and waited around to go to supper. As Judy started to get into Ken’s car, Tom went over to talk to her. "You did a good job today," he said, reaching for his wallet. "Better than I expected."

"Thanks," she told him. "I enjoyed it."

"Here," he said, shoving some bills into her hand.

"Tom, I can’t take this," she protested. "I didn’t do that much."

"Take it," he said. "I’d have had to pay that much to bring in someone else, if I could have gotten anyone."

Judy sat stunned. She unfolded the bills, which proved to be a pair of twenties. Ken could see tears rolling down her cheek. "Something the matter?" he asked.

Judy shook her head. "I never expected to get paid," she said.

"So what? You earned it."

"That’s it," she said, softly. "That’s the first money I ever earned in my life."