"Planting Day" (short story)
Their son, Ricky, was an hour late, and Ellie begged Cyrus to wait for him before going out to plow the field.
But Cyrus was determined to get started. “I don’t need him to do the plowing anyway. He’d just be in the way. The hard work is the planting, so he can help me with that when he shows up. If he shows up,” Cyrus added with a grunt. He stood up from the breakfast table and took his empty coffee cup over to the sink. “You can’t count on Ricky for anything.”
“Oh, don’t say that now, honey,” Ellie said as she stacked the rest of the dirty dishes. “You’re just upset because he never liked farming. But he put himself through that correspondence course on computers and got a good job down at IBM.”
Cyrus went over to his easy chair, pulled on his work boots and began to lace them up. “And he up and left Jennifer and that baby girl. You gonna defend your boy for that?”