The notice came in September of 2018, three lines in an industry newsletter Amos still got in the mail: Gideon Vale was no longer serving as chief executive of Bellwether Sample Systems, effective immediately, board statement to follow. There was no statement to follow that said anything useful.
Amos read it standing in the doorway of the equipment shed, in his coveralls, sixty-six years old that year and still climbing up onto combines to check hydraulic cylinders himself because the kid he'd hired to help him couldn't tell a bad seal from a good one yet.
"He's gone and the money's still gone too," Amos said. It wasn't a question so I didn't answer it like one.
We spent that afternoon doing inventory together the way we had for decades, him calling out serial numbers while I checked them against the clipboard, both of us moving slower around the yard than we used to, both of us there because neither one of us could afford to not be there anymore. Darlene's name came up twice. The house near their daughter did not come up at all.
When we broke for the truck tailgate and sandwiches, I told him I had something he should see. I'd been carrying a folded photocopy of that November 2015 table in my coat pocket on and off for nearly three years, telling myself there was no good moment, and I finally understood there was never going to be a good moment, only a worse one later.
He unfolded it slow, read it twice, and set it down on the tailgate like it might still bite him if he moved too fast. Pending appeared in that second column more times than he wanted to count out loud, though he counted anyway, under his breath, seven times down one page.
"When did you get this," he said.
"November of 2015," I told him. That part I gave him straight, because the date itself couldn't hurt anyone, only what I'd done with the three years after it.
"You've had this since 2015 and you told me expansion was running a little behind schedule." He wasn't shouting. Amos never shouted. He just got very still, the way he used to get still before telling a customer a deal was off.
"I didn't want you worrying over something that might still resolve itself," I said, which was true in the way a half-true thing is true, built out of a real sentence wrapped around a withheld one.
"What exactly did you see in that building in 2013," he said then, and I felt the question land somewhere under my ribs, because it wasn't about the table anymore, it was about the first thing, the thing underneath all of it.
"I saw them run the demonstration," I said. "I told you what I saw." It was the same sentence I'd been saying for five years, and saying it to him now, over a tailgate, with that table between us, it sounded thinner than it ever had in my own kitchen.
He looked at me a long moment, the way he'd look at a tractor engine that sounded almost right but not quite, searching for the one note that was off. He didn't find the words for it that day. He just folded the table back up, put it in his own pocket this time, and said we'd better finish the inventory before the light went.
We did finish it. We didn't go to lunch together again that week, or the next, and when we did eat again it was standing up at the counter of the feed store, talking about a baler part he needed, nothing personal in it at all. That was how it went between us after that, practical and short, the forty years of handshakes still there underneath but nothing getting added on top of them anymore.