the farm was at its loveliest in autumn, and the animals seemed to have a sense of lively playfulness just before the approaching winter came.
I sat quietly and made a mental list of all the things that I would do today, starting with using the money we made at the market to pay off the bills which were in the most immediate need of being paid before they were shut off. I always tried to catch them right before the shut-off dates if I could. Once something got disconnected, it was always a pain in the ass to get it turned back on, and there was usually an extra fee associated with it. I never understood how these companies expected the average person to ever be able to catch up if we were punished with even more fees than the ones we already couldn’t pay. I thought about what it would like to have the kind of lifestyle that DeShawn did. It was kind of incredible to think about how the three of us could even still relate to each other now that he was walking such a different path in life than my brother and me.
Here we were scraping literal coins together to try to fill the car with gas, and DeShawn was an actual billionaire. He was so wealthy that he was able to pitch the contents of an entire house without blinking an eye. There were probably tens of thousands of dollars of stuff in that house. If I’d had a bigger car, I would have taken it all. It was funny to think about how much different our perspectives on money were, but not all that funny to have to deal with it in reality. Oh well, there wasn’t much more that I could do about it aside from to keep working and pushing forward to do the best that I could. Pretty soon, DeShawn would leave, and things would go back to the normal that non-billionaires have around here.
I finished a few more sips of my coffee and then got ready to go back inside the house and get dressed. There was still enough daytime for me to take a decent chunk out of my chores. And it was such a nice day out that maybe I would let Ebony and Sprite run around in the field together for a while. Watching horses frolic in the pastures was definitely something that money couldn’t buy. But just as I was getting up, DeShawn stepped out onto the back patio and came to sit down beside me.
He had that look about him already; the one that I could tell means that he wants to have a conversation. It wasn’t that I didn’t like having deep conversations with him; I did. But lately, the conversations that he seemed to want to have were about the two of us. And no matter how many different ways I tried to spin that scenario in my mind, there just wasn’t a single way that I saw our two very different realities being able to join into one. We would have to literally rewrite the past in order to be together now. And that just wasn’t as easy as revisiting an old house and collecting a stuffed dog.
“Hey,” he said with a smile.
“Hey.”
14
Deshawn
“Where’s Scott?” Clara asked when I went to sit beside her on the porch.
“He went back out to the fields to keep up the harvest. We were able to get the harvester running again, at least for the moment.”
“That’s great,” she smiled. She looked relieved, although I wasn’t sure how long it would be before the piece of equipment broke down again.
I was pretty decent with tech and cybersecurity, but I didn’t really have any clue how to fix hands-on type of machinery. I figured it was probably just a stroke of luck that somehow Scott and I together had managed to get it up and running. He was smart to take advantage of its working condition now because who knew if it would start up again once we turned the thing off. It would take him a few days even with the harvester to finish the harvest completely, and if it broke, then it would be back to doing it by hand again.
I looked at Clara as she stared back at me. Her smile this morning when I had handed her the coffee mug had given me enough hope and a smidgen of courage to come out here and