The Shop Door Opened at Seven

The card was pinned to the corkboard by the co-op door, right between a lost dog notice and a flyer for the Lutheran church pie auction. I would not have noticed it if the coffee table had not gone so quiet.

It was a plain white business card. Dale Brandvold Welding and Repair, with the phone number and the address out by the highway. On the back, in black marker, somebody had written four words.

Rick’s customers welcome. Thanks.

I knew the handwriting. I had seen it on twenty some years of Christmas cards.

I stood there with the fuel bill in one hand and my checkbook in the other. Behind me, six men at the round table by the coffee pot had stopped talking about yields and the price of beans.

It was the second week of September. My husband had been in the ground at the Lutheran cemetery for twenty one days.

“Shelly,” somebody said.

I turned around. Harold Lindgren was the oldest man at the table, eighty one and still running his own grain cart every fall. He had his cap off, turning it in his big hands.

“I’m sorry about Rick,” he said. “I should have said so at the funeral. I didn’t know what to say.”

“That’s all right, Harold.”

He looked at the others. Nobody helped him. Arlo Jensen was looking down into his styrofoam cup like there was something at the bottom of it.

“Dale was in here last week,” Harold said finally. “He says Rick’s place is shut down for good. Says you’re selling the welders and the plasma cutter. Says to bring everything to him now.”

I did not say anything. I did not trust what would come out.

“He said it was what Rick would want,” Harold added, more quietly. “Somebody to take care of his customers.”

“Did he,” I said.

I paid the fuel bill. The girl at the counter, a sweet young thing named Kayla who used to babysit Luke, would not meet my eyes either. Everyone in that building had already heard it.

I walked out to the pickup and sat behind the wheel. The card was still on the corkboard. I had left it there. I did not want to give anyone the satisfaction of watching the widow tear something off a wall.

Rick

Rick Brandvold died on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August, out in the shop he built with his own hands on the home place, eleven miles north of Webster in Day County, South Dakota.

His heart quit. That is what the doctor in Aberdeen said, more or less, though he used longer words. Rick was fifty one years old. He had been running a bead on a broken cattle panel hinge, and he set the stinger down, sat on the overturned bucket he always sat on, and did not get up.

Luke found him. Luke was twenty, home for the summer after his first year of the welding program at Lake Area Tech in Watertown, though he had already decided he was not going back. He did not need to. He had been welding beside his dad since he was thirteen.

I was in the house making supper. I heard Luke yell, and I knew from the sound of it.

I will not write more about that day. Some things are not for anybody else.

What I will tell you is that I had kept the books for Brandvold Welding for twenty two years. Every invoice, every work order, every box of 7018 rod and every bottle of argon mix we ever bought from the welding supply in Aberdeen.

I did the quarterly taxes at the kitchen table. I kept the liability policy paid up, and I knew which farmers paid in thirty days and which ones paid after the calves sold.

Rick did the welding. I did everything else. He charged sixty dollars an hour. He had charged sixty dollars an hour for fourteen years. When I told him once that even the shops in Groton were getting eighty five, he just shook his head.

“These are our neighbors, Shell,” he said. “I’m not going to get rich off a man’s broken drill on a Saturday in May.”

That was Rick.