“Your father-in-law’s been talking at the co-op.”

Merle Hansen said it the second I pulled the suction out of his mouth.

He said it kindly. The way you’d tell a man his tailgate was down.

I had my scaler in my right hand and his chart open on the screen. I set the scaler down on the tray.

“Talking about what, Merle?”

He looked up at the ceiling tiles for a long while.

Merle was eighty-one. A retired corn and cattle man from out past Gibbon. He’d been sitting in my chair every six months for nine years.

And he was the kind of man who figured a woman ought to know what was being said about her in a room she could never walk into.

“Walt says he wasn’t about to sell the place to his boy,” Merle said. “Says the boy married a town girl. And she’d have it chopped up into lots by Christmas.”

The little radio on the counter was playing the gospel station out of Hastings. I remember that.

I remember the clip on his paper bib had come loose on one side. I reached over and fixed it before I said anything at all.

“Thank you for telling me, Merle,” I said.

“For what it’s worth, I didn’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve known you since you had braces.”

He had.

My dad ran a gas station on Second Avenue in Kearney, Nebraska, for thirty years. Half the farmers in Buffalo County filled up their pickups there and watched me do my homework on the counter next to the beef jerky.

I was a town girl. That part was true.

I grew up four blocks from the high school. Sidewalk out front. Streetlight outside my bedroom window. I didn’t know a heifer from a steer until I was nineteen years old.

I finished Merle’s cleaning. I did a good job on it too. My hands know how to keep working when the rest of me has stepped out of the room.

Then I walked him to the front desk. I wrote “six months” on his appointment card.

And then I went into the supply closet, and shut the door, and stood there in the dark between the boxes of gloves and fluoride until my face felt like my own again.

My name is Amy Brandt. I’m a dental hygienist in Kearney. I was thirty-six that spring.

And to understand why that one sentence at the co-op coffee table cut so deep, you have to understand the homeplace.