The Booth by the Window

The check

Afterward, in the church basement, over ham sandwiches and the big silver urn, Donna took a folded guest check out of her purse. She had pulled it off the register spike where she kept the last one he wrote.

“I thought Ellen would want it.”

Mom looked at it over her coffee. Then she took it out of Donna’s hand and held it closer.

“Wade,” she said. “That printing.”

She did not say anything else for a moment. She did not have to. A tall, square, perfectly even hand, and a note on the lid of a Hobart mixer in the same hand.

“The mixer,” Mom said. “Oh, honey. It was him.”

Pastor Greg had been listening. He cleared his throat. “We had a coffee urn at the church go dead in February. The element. Somebody left it back on the shelf working, with a note.” He looked at the check. “I never wondered.”

Then a few others, quietly, passing the check down the table. A screen door. A porch swing. A bike chain that had fixed itself overnight. Nothing a person would think to mention, and every one of them with the same tall printing and no name. Ellen told me later she found a lathe in his garage and a coffee can full of small brass parts, and a shoebox of carbon copies of guest checks, one for every Thursday.

Nobody said anything grand. Somebody just refilled the urn.

The tools

By the cars, when the basement had emptied out and June was holding my mother’s hand, Ellen found me.

“He’d have been mortified,” she said, wiping her face. “All these people.”

“I think he’d have said, that’s plenty.”

She laughed, a little wet. “He’s wearing the coat. The funeral home wanted to put him in a suit and I said no. Maryann’s lining is on him. That was the one thing he asked.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”

From her car she brought out a canvas tool roll, tied with a leather lace, and a small wooden case. “He wanted you to have these. They’re used. The roll’s wrenches and a torque wrench, and the case has his micrometers. There’s a note.”

“Ellen. That’s too much.”

“Is it?” she said quietly. “You told him about the tool list.”

I took them.

I read the note that night at the kitchen table while Mom stood at the sink drying a dish that was already dry. One page, folded in thirds, in the same tall, even letters.

Wade,

These are used. They were good tools when I bought them and they are good now. Tools are the cheap part. Use them. A tool in a drawer is a decoration.

Dennis Reicher has room for a hand. Go see him Monday. A man is allowed to be helped.

Say good morning to the next one.

Hal

Mom had given up pretending. She stood behind my chair with her hands on my shoulders and read it over my head.

“He sounds like your father,” she said.

“He does.”

“Don’t you go telling people your father sent him,” she said. “That man never sent anybody anywhere on time.”

I laughed. Then I picked up the micrometer case and held it in my lap for a long while, and she let me.