The Ring on His Kitchen Floor

The nail by the red toolbox

There is a sixteen-penny nail driven into the barn wall beside my red toolbox. For twenty years my wedding ring hung on that nail every working day, because a ring and a spinning fan belt do not get along, and I have seen what is left of a man’s finger after they meet. Every morning I took it off and hung it there. Every evening at five I put it back on before I drove home. Dana used to tease me that the nail had spent more hours married than I had.

That nail had been empty since Friday.

I had looked for the ring behind the toolbox, under the parts shelves, down the floor drain with a flashlight and a coat hanger. I had not told Dana. We had been fighting enough that fall without me handing her one more thing I had lost.

Now I sat there staring at an empty nail, and I knew exactly what the sheriff had found in Harlan’s kitchen.

I did not know how it had gotten there. I only knew that it had, the way you know a storm is on the ground before the siren starts.

The old man on Route 9

I should tell you about Harlan, and about how things had been changing, because I felt it coming the way you feel weather in your knees.

I met Harlan six years ago, when his well pump quit in the middle of August and nobody in Pruett County would drive that far out for an old man who paid in cash and complaints. I went. It took me all of a Saturday and half a Sunday to pull that pump, and he stood over me the whole time telling me I was doing it wrong. When the water finally came up clear, he handed me a glass of it, watched me drink it, and said, “Well. You’ll do.”

After that I kept going, every Saturday. I fixed his fence, his stock tank float, his porch step, and his hearing aid, twice. I drove him to the VA clinic in Amarillo when his knee swelled up. I sat with him the day they put down his old heeler, Bo, and neither one of us said a word for an hour.

He had no children. His wife, June, had been gone eleven years. Her wind chime still hung by the front door, and he would not let anybody touch it. Some Saturdays we did not fix a thing. We sat on the porch and watched the wind move through the grass, and he told me about the drought of ’56 and the girl from Memphis, Texas, who had taught him to dance and then married a banker.

Dana did not mind the old man. She minded the hours.

“You give him more Saturdays than you give me,” she said in September, and she was not wrong. I did not know how to explain that out there, with Harlan, I felt like somebody who mattered. At the barn I was the man who kept the buses running. At home I was the man who had not fixed the dryer. On Harlan’s porch I was just Cole, and that was enough.

Money was tight that fall. The school district had cut Dana’s hours in the front office at the elementary, and our daughter Kaylee’s tuition at the university in Lubbock came due all at once. We argued about it at the kitchen table more nights than not. Sometimes I went for a drive afterward so I would not say something I could not take back. I would drive the county roads with the windows down until the anger ran out, and then I would come home and sleep on my own side of the bed with my back to her.

I am not proud of those drives. I would give a great deal to have one of them back.