I passed the diner on Market Avenue, where a cup of black coffee now cost two dollars, but I did not stop. I drove straight back to the farm, the gray hills of Stark County rolling past the Buick’s dirty windows. The mail carrier had already come and gone, leaving the black metal box at the end of our lane stuffed with circulars and store coupons.
I pulled a thick, oversized envelope from the pile, addressed to Kenneth in bright red ink. It had no return address, only a postmark from Columbus.
Inside was a glossy brochure, printed in colors too bright for an Ohio autumn. The paper was heavy and slick under my thumb.
The cover showed a vast field of silver solar panels under a purple sky, with the words Venus Energy Solutions stamped across the top in gold foil.
I stood by the gravel driveway, looking at the picture of a solar field on Venus.
I set the colorful pages face down on the kitchen table at seven that evening. Kenneth was already at the table, his spoon scraping the bottom of his bowl of beef stew. The old refrigerator hummed in the corner, a steady, irritating vibration that always seemed louder after dark.
“I found this in the mailbox,” I said, pointing to the shiny paper of the Venus brochure.
Kenneth did not look up from his plate. He kept chewing, his thumbs rising to rub his temples in that quick, nervous way he had used since we were children.
“It is a private placement, Evelyn,” he said, speaking so fast his words ran together. “You were not supposed to be digging through my mail.”
“Our joint farm account is missing forty-five thousand dollars, Kenneth. Is that where it went?”
“The money is exactly where the future needs it to be,” he said, finally looking at me. “A blind woman saw the future, and Gerald is the only one preparing us for it.”
I leaned against the counter, feeling the cold draft under the kitchen door. “What blind woman?”
“Baba Vanga,” he said. “She laid out the timeline for 2026. Gerald has the charts that prove it.”
“Kenneth, she died decades ago. You are talking about a mystic who has been gone since the nineties.”
“She was a prophet,” he said, slamming his spoon down so hard the stew splashed onto the oilcloth. “Gerald showed me the translations. The global markets are going to dissolve by spring.”
“And a solar field on Venus is going to save our farm?”
“You do not have the vision for this,” he said, his face flushing red as he stood up. “You never did.”
He walked out toward the back hallway, leaving his half-finished dinner to grow cold on the table.
An hour later, I took my flashlight and went out to the barn to find him. The smell of damp pine needles was strong in the dark yard, and a single yellow bulb was burning inside the tractor shed. The old John Deere tractor sat in the shadows, its green paint covered in a layer of gray dust.
Kenneth was standing by the workbench, sorting through a wooden crate of old brass gears. He was laying them out in neat rows on a greasy rag, his fingers slick with black oil.
“What are you doing with those?” I asked, shining the flashlight beam toward his hands.
