The Coffee Can at the Farm Gate

“Did you not know about this?”

“No,” I said. “I did not.”

He sat down. He did not exactly decide to. The chair was behind him and his knees found it.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said, very quietly. Then, a moment later, “I thought it was strange. I thought, that doesn’t sound like Carla. But it said not to bother you. So I didn’t bother you.”

“You are never a bother to me.”

“I figured maybe feed was high. Maybe the hogs were high.” He shook his head. “I figured you needed the help and were too proud to ask, and Tammy was doing the asking for you.”

That one went in under my ribs and stayed there.

Because if Merle thought it, the rest of them thought it. Every person who got that yellow letter had opened it at a kitchen table somewhere and believed that Bob and I had our hands out.

I poured him a glass of iced tea because I needed something to do with my hands.

“How many did she send it to?”

“All of them, I’d guess. Same as every year.” He patted the other side of his shirt. “I’ve got her list out in the truck. For the name tags.”

Merle has made the name tags for the reunion since before I came into the family. He prints them by hand in block letters, first name big, and underneath, smaller, whose child you are. It is the only way half the cousins know each other.

“Would you get it for me?” I asked.

He was gone a good while. I watched him through the screen door, working his way down the porch steps one at a time with his hand on the rail, then across the yard to that little green pickup he has driven since before our son was born.

When he came back he had two sheets of notebook paper stapled at the corner.

It was Tammy’s handwriting, round and neat. A column of family names down the left side. A number beside each one for how many were coming. And in a third column, a dollar figure and a little check mark.

I ran my finger down it.

Twenty-eight families. Some lines said 50. Some said 75. One said 200, which was Bob’s cousin from Kearney with all those grandchildren.

About two thirds of the way down I found Stacy. Stacy and her four kids. Five people. One hundred twenty-five dollars, and a check mark.

Stacy cleans rooms at the motel on the highway and works the breakfast counter on weekends. Her littlest is four years old. Tammy had charged a four-year-old twenty-five dollars to eat a ham sandwich at her great-uncle’s farm.

Near the bottom was Merle’s own line.

It said, “Merle. 1. 20, owes 5.”

At the foot of the second page Tammy had added it up and drawn a line under it. Eighty-six people.

I did the figuring on the back of an envelope, and then I did it again. Eighty-six times twenty-five is two thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. Less the five she was still waiting on from an old man on Social Security.

I pushed Merle’s five ones back across the table to him.

He would not pick them up.

“I pay my way, Carla.”

“There isn’t any way to pay. There never was.”

“Then I gave her twenty for nothing.”

“You will have that twenty back on Saturday,” I said. “I promise you that.”