The Widow in the Deer Stand

I have watched that boy’s face since the day he was born. I have never seen the color leave it that way.

Mark did not raise his voice. I will give him that, because I had asked him not to in the truck and he kept his word. He walked up to the round table and laid a hand flat on it.

“We saw a real nice buck,” he said. “And I had coffee with the lady who owns your place.”

The table went quiet. Then the next table. It went across that room like a wind crossing a wheat field, booth by booth, until the only sound was the grill.

“I paid you six hundred dollars,” Mark said. “Three hundred of it was his.” He put his other hand on Ben’s shoulder. “He’s fifteen. You shook his hand.”

Cody opened his mouth and nothing came.

An old man at the next table, Jeff, who ran the grader shift opposite Wes for twenty years, turned all the way around in his chair.

“What place?” he said. “Wes’s eighty?”

“He’s been selling hunts on it,” Don said from the doorway. I had not known he followed us in. “Hundred and fifty a day. Told folks it was his.”

“Wes has been in the ground twenty months,” Jeff said. He said it to Cody, not loud. “That man taught you everything you know, son.”

That was all anybody said. Nobody shouted. Nobody needed to. Forty people who had known Wes looked at Cody, and Cody looked at his eggs.

Mark had more in him. I could see it coming up. He drew a breath, and I put my hand on his arm.

“That’s enough,” I said. “He’s heard it. He’s my sister’s boy, and I’ll take it from here.”

Mark looked at me. Then he nodded once and stepped back, and he and Ben sat down at the counter.

I pulled out the chair across from Cody and sat. The men at that table found reasons to carry their plates elsewhere. The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of me without being asked and laid her hand on my shoulder for a second on her way by.

Cody would not look up.

“Aunt Marlene,” he said. “I can explain.”

“I expect you can. I’d like you to start with how much.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be.”

“How much, Cody.”

He swallowed. “I don’t know exactly.”

I took a pen out of my purse and turned his paper placemat over to the blank side and slid it across to him.

“Then write it down. Every name you can remember, and how many days. Take your time. I’ve got nowhere to be.”

It took him a quarter of an hour. I drank my coffee and watched him write. Last fall, the first season after the funeral: two men from Grand Island, eight days between them. This fall, bowhunters in October, six days. And for the rifle season, fourteen days already paid for. That was Mark and Ben, and a man from Fremont, and two brothers from Lincoln.

Twenty-eight days. He did the multiplying himself, at the bottom, and drew a line under it.

$4,200.

He looked at that number a long time.

“Where is it?” I said.