The Banquet For My Replacement
“I will not be signing anything,” Vince said. His voice cracked.
“Then I will be calling the sheriff on Monday,” Randy said, and I realized he was not unkind about it. He was just done. “It is a debt. It is a legal one. That is how it works.”
I walked out through the kitchen, because it was closest, and because I could not stand to cross that dining room again. Gil was standing near the dish pit, still holding the folder. He was shaking. He stared at me as if I were the sheriff.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry. I did not know it was going to be like that. I just read what the screen said.”
“That is exactly what you should have done,” I said. “You were honest, and you were kind. That is rarer than you think.”
I took a fifty out of my purse and tried to hand it to him. He shook his head. I put it in his shirt pocket.
“Do not argue with me,” I said. “I am an old woman of thirty-six.”
He laughed, a startled little laugh, and then he wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
Kim drove us home. She did not say anything for the first mile and a half, which for Kim is a record. Then she put her hand over her mouth and made a noise I will never forget, a strange, helpless, delighted wheeze, and I started laughing too, and we laughed until she had to pull over at the Marathon station on Route 9 and sit with the engine running and the wipers going, though it had not rained.
“The pearls,” she kept saying. “The pearls.”
I did not feel triumphant. I want to be honest about that. I felt tired, and lighter, and a little bit sad for a girl in a white dress, and I felt the particular quiet of a long argument that is finally over because the other person has no more words.
Let me tell you what happened after.
Donna called me on Sunday morning, eleven times. I let it ring. She left four voicemails. The first was a demand, the second a threat, the third was, “I only wanted what was best for Vince,” and the fourth was just breathing, and then a click.
On Monday, Vince came to the store. He stood in the doorway, under my father’s sign, in yesterday’s suit. He asked if we could “talk like adults.” I told him that adults would have talked in the conference room, and that the conversation we were about to have would be in front of the woman who has worked my front counter since 1994 and was at that moment ringing up a box of fence staples about four feet away. He left.
He sold the lake condo in November. The second mortgage swallowed most of the sale. He now rents a one-bedroom over the pharmacy in Elk Fork and works at a dealership two counties over, which Dennis tells me is a mercy, because it is not Dennis’s dealership.
Stacy went home to Paducah in the first week of October. She mailed the pearls back to Donna in a padded envelope with no note. I understand that Donna, who had made a speech about the Dunham line, now keeps them in a drawer.