The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral
I put my arms around my daughter in the middle of that fellowship hall, with paper plates of fried chicken all around us and old women in their church dresses pretending not to watch, and I did not say anything because there was nothing true I could say that would not make it worse, and that is when I heard Denny Prewitt’s voice behind me, low and rough.
“Excuse me. Son, I don’t mean to intrude on you on a day like this.”
I turned around. Up close he had kind eyes, deep lines around them, the look of a man who has spent his life outdoors and dealing fair with people because dealing fair is the only way a man in his line of work keeps his name worth anything in a county this size.
“You’re Denny Prewitt,” I said.
“I am. And I believe I owe your family an apology, and I do not say that lightly, because I have done forty years of estate buyouts in four counties and I have never once had to say it before.” He turned his hat over in his hands. “Earl just told me whose place that was I cleared out Tuesday. I did not know it was Hollis Coley’s shop. I knew Hollis, some, from Saturday mornings at the hardware store, good man, fair man, I bought a chainsaw off him once he wouldn’t take full price for because he said it had a hairline crack in the housing he didn’t feel right charging for. I did not put it together that the woman who called me about a shop buyout was his widow, and I surely did not know, until your sister just told me not two minutes ago, that there was a cradle out there somebody’s granddaughter was expecting a baby to sleep in.”
My chest had gone very tight. “You have it.”
“I have it. It’s still in my trailer, son. I have not unloaded a thing yet, I was headed to do that this evening, and I only came to this supper because Hollis Coley sold me a saw once for less than it was worth out of plain decency, and I felt like I owed him the thirty minutes it takes to eat a plate of chicken at his funeral. I did not come here knowing I’d owe him a great deal more than that.”
He looked at Dana, who had gone very still, her hand pressed flat against her belly.
“Ma’am, if you’ll give me twenty minutes, I will go get it.”
He went. The whole fellowship hall had gone a little quiet by then, the way a room does when something is happening at the edges of it that nobody has words for yet but everybody can feel, and I saw Charlene sitting at the end of a table near the kitchen, a plate in front of her she had not touched, watching Denny Prewitt walk out the side door, and her face had the look of a woman watching a bill come due that she had been hoping would get lost in the mail.