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Barn - Part One

By Ben Greenman

She's older. That's the first thing you need to know about her.

I'm pregnant. That's the first thing you need to know about me.

Our favorite colors are one color, blue. Even two people who are very different can be similar. You should know that, too, because it may explain the way things went.

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I married a farmer. I didn't plan to do it. It just happened. To be fair, I didn't know that he was a farmer. He was just some guy I met in a bar, and then later he came into the hardware store where I was working and pretended to be surprised to see me. We went out on two dates before I even got his name right -- I thought it was Bert and it turned out to be Berne, which is such a strange first name that I don't think I can be blamed for my mistake. My sister's husband, who owned the hardware store, said that when he first saw the name on the credit card he thought it was Verne, and he blinked twice to get the B to turn. But it didn't. It was Berne.

Berne and I dated for six months. He bought me presents all the time: a necklace with a heart-shaped charm, a red scarf, a hat. Then we broke it off when I went to McCook Community College to study Medical Transcription.

He broke up with me because he thought I was dating my teacher, Mr. Carr, which was ridiculous, because I didn't even like him that much. Once Mr. Carr and I went out to coffee because he said that he needed to talk to me about my exam, but after about fifteen minutes it became painfully clear that he had nothing at all to say about the exam, and that he just wanted to tell me all about his divorce, and how his wife couldn't give him any kids.

I guess I felt sorry for him, because I went back to his house after that, but we didn't do anything except sit around on the couch with the outsides of our legs touching each other. Then he leaned over and kissed my shoulder. His lips were cool on my skin.

I don't even know how Berne found out. Maybe I mentioned it because it seemed like such a nothing. But it wasn't nothing to Berne -- he screamed and hung up on me and then called me back to scream some more. I only went out with Mr. Carr once after that, and it was to tell him that even though I respected him as a teacher (which wasn't really true) and liked him as a person (which wasn't really true either) I couldn't see him anymore because I had a guy back home who wanted to get more serious. That was true, and before I knew it I was Mrs. Berne Moser, and I was throwing the bouquet over my shoulder. It stayed in the air for a while, and then Sarah caught it.

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How can it be that my sister was in line to catch the bouquet when she had a husband who owned the hardware store? Easy. He died. Ed McCaffrey, 58, Owned McCaffrey's Hardware Store: That was the article in the local paper. Ed was a rough-and-tumble guy, always getting into brawls over the silliest thing. Once he threw another guy through a window because the guy didn't like "Some Came Running," which was Ed's favorite movie of all time. Sarah was always saying that she thought Ed would die in a bar fight, or in a motorcycle wreck. But neither of those two things happened. He died of a sudden heart attack, behind the counter at the hardware store. It was the same counter where I worked for hundreds of days, but when I went back there after Ed's funeral it didn't seem like the same counter at all. It was still and quiet, with none of the glorious mess. The register drawer was open, which is never was, and it was empty, which it never was. One of the other clerks said that they buried Ed with his money, but I wasn't sure whether that was a kind of knock on Ed for being a notorious cheapskate or a kind of joke about how much he loved his business, so I didn't say anything.

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Ed had a first wife. Her name was Shelley. He liked making cracks about how all the women in his life had names that began with S. Even Shirley MacLaine, who was his favorite actress. Ed and Shelley had a son who they named Dave. Ed always said that it was in honor of his Uncle Dave, and not Frank Sinatra's character in Some Came Running. Sarah always said that she never met Uncle Dave and didn't think he existed. She never met Shelley either; she moved out of town right after she and Ed split up, which was right after Dave was born.

Dave worked in the hardware store with me when I first started there. I was nineteen and he was seventeen. Ed wasn't my brother-in-law yet, just my boss. So Dave was nothing to me, until he was something. We locked up late sometimes, and one time he told me that I was looking pretty, and the next thing you know we were crouching down under the key counter. Every time he moved or I moved the whole thing jingled like Christmas, so he tried to stay still and so did I. We only fooled around a few times after that, and then I started going with this older guy and Dave kind of got his feelings hurt. The older guy wasn't Berne. Berne was two guys later, and by then Dave had quit the hardware store and gone to Lincoln to try to be a painter. Not a house painter, either. A real painter. Ed always joked about how any man who painted was a fruit but I know that he was proud of Dave because he hung his paintings in the back office. One of them was of a woman standing by a window, looking out. Ed said that it looked just like Shelley, and he didn't understand how that was possible because Dave never met his mother. Dave told me that it was a girl named Roberta who posed for him in Lincoln. He also told me that she was the second girl that he ever did it with, and that she wasn't as good as the first. Go on, I said. Flattery will get you nowhere. I didn't tell Sarah about the woman in the painting, but we both agreed it was a nice painting, because it was mostly blue.

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Dave was always real close to his dad. They drank together almost every day, from when Dave was just a little boy until Dave left town. Ed wasn't one to keep a boy from drinking. When Sarah married Ed she told me that she and Dave didn't get along, not because Dave couldn't accept her as his stepmother, but because he couldn't accept having less of his father's attention. Sarah liked talking that way; when she went down to McCook she took mostly psychology classes. I told her that it would get better, that Dave was a nice guy who didn't usually hold a grudge over stupid things.

I was wrong. Dave didn't like her to start with, and after about six months the two of them hated each other. He called me once when he was back in town and said that he didn't understand how I could be sisters with such a conceited, stupid, putting-on-airs kind of person. I told him that Sarah and I were different, but not so different. He told me that I needed to think more highly of myself. Then he started telling me that I was still on his mind all the time. While he was talking, Berne walked in the room, and I had to pretend he was the grocer on the phone so that Berne wouldn't get suspicious.

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Berne's dad was a farmer, but he was also a banker. He gave loans to other farmers. Berne has showed me pictures of his father when he first came to town in the fifties. He was a nicely dressed man, as handsome as his son, and he was always smiling. In the pictures, at least. To hear Berne tell it, he took a turn for the worse after he married Berne's mother, who was the kind of woman who liked to tell her husband one thing and do another thing. That other thing, mostly, was running around with other men. Berne says that's the main reason he's so jealous, because his mama made a fool of his daddy. The men in town who were friends of Berne's daddy used to tell him to leave. Ed wasn't one of those friends -- he was a roughneck, and Berne's daddy was a gentle soul -- but he was a man who people listened to. You know, he liked to say, if I had a woman like that it would put crazy thoughts in my head.

Berne's daddy had his own saying: When a man has crazy thoughts in his head, he should count to ten and pray that those thoughts go away. Ed and Berne's daddy must have been talking about two different kinds of crazy thoughts, because at some point his daddy couldn't count to ten anymore. Instead he went out to the barn, looped a rope over the main beam of the barn, and hanged himself until he was dead.