You don’t answer him right away.
You just look at his hands, clean and soft, the hands of a man who never had to pull survival out of dirt.
Then you look down at your own palms, cracked and bleeding, and you feel something settle in your chest.

You walk out of the store with the glass wrapped tight, and you leave his twenty dollars on the counter where it belongs: unaccepted.
Outside, the prairie wind snaps at your skirt like a warning.
Fritz and Greta run to meet you, their faces bright because children are loyal to hope.

“Did you get it?” Fritz asks, and his voice tries to sound brave like a little man, but it still trembles.
You nod and kneel so you’re eye level with both of them.
“This,” you whisper, touching the paper package, “is our window.”

Greta claps like you just bought a castle.
Fritz doesn’t clap. He looks at you carefully, because he’s learned to measure promises by whether they come with food.
You squeeze his shoulder. “We’re going to make it,” you tell him, and you say it like a decision, not a wish.

Back on the land, the half-dug rectangle waits like an open mouth.
It’s just a wound in the prairie right now, raw soil exposed, edges uneven.
But when you step into it, the wind softens, and you realize the earth already wants to help you.

You work until your arms shake.
You cut sod blocks with the spade, lift them, drag them, stack them.
The rhythm is brutal and simple: slice, pry, heave, place.

Fritz becomes your shadow.
He carries what he can, and when he can’t carry, he steadies.
He learns how to tuck the blocks tight so the seams don’t gape like teeth.

Greta gathers dry grass and leaves like she’s collecting treasure.
She brings you armfuls of “soft,” and you don’t correct her.
Because softness matters when you’re building a home out of stubbornness.

By the time the sun dips low, your knees ache as if bones can bruise.
Your hands sting, but the wall is higher now, the shape clearer.
Not pretty, not straight, but standing.

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