The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral
The call came through somewhere past Rolla, where the cell towers along I-44 get thin and the hills start climbing up out of the Meramec valley into the kind of country my father always called God’s country, on account of nobody else wanted it enough to improve it.
“Russ.” Earl Dunnigan’s voice had that flat, careful sound a man uses when he is about to hand you something heavy. “You on the road?”
“Hour out of Rolla. What is it, Earl.”
“There’s a flatbed in Hollis’s drive. Fella’s loading the shop out of it right now. I’m standing here looking at it.”
I remember the exact stretch of highway. A green sign for Lebanon, exit two miles. A hawk sitting on a fence post like it owned the fence. Kim beside me in the passenger seat with her eyes closed, trying to sleep off four hours of driving since Springfield, and I remember thinking, in the stupid, sideways way your mind works when it is trying not to understand something: he means the garage. He means somebody’s cleaning out the garage.
“Which shop, Earl.”
“Hollis’s shop. The woodshop. There’s a man with a trailer backed right up to the roll door and he’s got the planer on a dolly right now, Russ, I’m looking at your daddy’s planer going up a ramp.”
I did not say anything for a second. Kim opened her eyes.
“Charlene called him,” Earl said. “Some fella does estate buyouts, does tool shows down around Buffalo. She called him Tuesday. I only know because my boy Cody does hay for the Prewitts and he saw the truck heading that way and recognized it.”
“Does my dad’s shop,” I said, like saying it slow would change what the words meant.
“Russ, I’m sorry. I didn’t know till I drove past ten minutes ago. I’da called sooner.”
“How much is loaded.”
“Looks like most of it. The bench is still bolted down. Everything off the walls is gone. The lumber rack’s half empty.”
I thanked Earl and I hung up and I sat there holding the wheel with both hands at ten and two like a boy in driver’s ed, doing seventy down a four lane, and Kim put her hand on my arm and said, “Russ. Pull over if you need to.”
“I don’t need to pull over.”
“Call her.”
I called Charlene. It rang four times and went to the voicemail she still had set up in Hollis’s voice from before he got sick, because she never could bring herself to change it, which should tell you she was not a woman without a heart, whatever else this day was about to prove about her judgment. I listened to my father’s voice say you’ve reached the Coleys, leave a message and I had to pull the phone away from my ear for a second before I could talk.
“Charlene, it’s Russ. Call me back. Now, please.”
She called back nine minutes later, while I was doing eighty past Waynesville with my jaw so tight it ached for two days after.