The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

“Nobody was going to collect off Mrs. Novak.”

“Her slip was the third one you read out, Rick. You put it in the total.”

He hung up. I sat with the phone in my hand, and I will say plainly that I cried, because he is my brother and I did not know how long he would be gone.

By Friday afternoon the pail held nothing but the smell.

Thirty-three doors. Forty slips. Jim and I had put better than five hundred miles on two trucks.

The forty-first slip was still in my jacket pocket.

I did not take Jim to that one. He offered. I told him this one was just for a sister, and he understood.

Dale lives on the east side of Ellsworth, in the house he and Karen bought in 1999. His truck was in the drive, the one with the note on it, washed, because Dale has never let a truck sit dirty no matter what he owed on it. The porch light was on.

I had thought all week about how to do it. I could have waited for the Saturday of the shop sale and done it in front of whoever came. Some part of me, I will admit, had pictured that. It was not the best part of me, and it was no part that Dad raised.

He never once handed a man his debt in front of other people.

So I went up the steps by myself and knocked, with the empty pail in my left hand.

Dale opened the door in his sock feet. He looked at me, and at the pail, and his face shut like a gate.

“If you came to tell me what you did, I already heard. The whole town has heard. I got looked at in the bank lobby yesterday like I’d kicked a dog.”

“I didn’t come to tell you anything.”

“Then what’s that?”

I had taken it out of my pocket. It was folded in thirds and yellow at the creases.

“It’s the last one,” I said. “I saved it.”

He took it because I was holding it out. He unfolded it under the porch light. I watched him get down to his own name.

I have known my brother fifty-two years. I have seen him thrown from a horse and I have seen him at our mother’s grave. I had never seen his face do what it did then.

“I forgot,” he said. It came out of him like air out of a tire. “Lynn, I swear to you. I forgot I ever wrote it.”

“I know you did.”

“I’d been laid off four months. The truck quit on 156 with Karen and both kids in it. Dad wrote the check to that shop in Salina right at the counter, and I said I would pay him back by harvest.” “I was going to. Then it was the next year. He never said anything, and I let that mean it was all right.”

“It was all right. That’s why he never said anything.”

“I sat at his table a week ago and voted to go collect off Mrs. Novak.” His voice cracked on her name. “And I was in the pail the whole time.”

“For more than any of them,” I said. I did not say it to cut him. It was only the arithmetic, and I gave it to him as gently as I knew how.

He sat down on the top step. A man of fifty-six, in his socks, in October. I sat down beside him and set the pail between our feet.