The Shop Door Opened at Seven

The Kitchen Table

Luke was sitting at the kitchen table when I got home. He had Rick’s welding helmet in his lap, the old black one with the sticker of the Webster Bearcats peeling off the side. He was turning it over and over in his hands.

He had heard about the card. Everybody had.

“Mom,” he said. “I can do it.”

“I know you can.”

“I mean it. I can do anything Dad did. Structural, hardfacing, aluminum on the TIG. I can cut and fit. I did half of his jobs this summer anyway.”

“I know, honey.”

“Then why are we letting him tell people we can’t?”

I sat down across from him. I did not have an answer. The truth was I had not thought past the funeral. I had been living one day at a time, signing things, answering the phone, writing thank you notes for hotdishes.

“Uncle Dale thinks we’re done,” Luke said. “Everybody does.”

“Your uncle hasn’t asked me a single thing.”

“So don’t ask him either.” Luke set the helmet on the table. “Just open.”

I looked at my son. He had Rick’s hands, square and scarred across the knuckles. He had Rick’s quiet. He had been carrying his father’s death around for a month without saying one word about it.

“You’d have to do all of it,” I said. “The welding. I can run a grinder and haul steel, but I can’t do what your dad did.”

“I know.”

“And it’s harvest. Things break in harvest. People need them fixed the same day.”

“I know, Mom.”

I thought about the sixty dollars an hour. I thought about Harold’s grain cart sitting in Dale’s lot. I thought about Rick on that bucket.

“First Monday of harvest,” I said. “Seven o’clock. Same as your dad.”

Sunday Night

On Sunday night after church I went out to the shop by myself.

I had not been inside it more than twice since August. Luke had cleaned up after the ambulance left. He had put the stinger back on its hook and coiled the leads and turned off the machine. He had moved the bucket Rick sat on into the corner and turned it right side up.

The shop smelled like it always had. Steel and old oil and the burnt smell of flux that never leaves the walls.

Rick’s leather apron hung on a nail by the door. It was brown and cracked and spotted black with a thousand little burns. I took it down and put it over my head and tied it behind me.

It hung past my knees. It smelled like him. Burnt flux and coffee and the Lava soap he scrubbed with at the utility sink.

I stood there in it for a while. Then I went to the old metal desk in the corner and opened the top drawer. His spiral order book was right where it always was, a fat green one from the Ben Franklin in Webster, the cover soft and gray with fingerprints.

Rick wrote every job in that book first, in pencil, before I ever typed up an invoice. I flipped to the last page with writing on it.

His last entry was dated the Monday before he died.

Arlo Jensen. 630F header. Main tube cracked behind the feeder opening. Bring in when beans start. Gusset both sides.

I sat down on the concrete floor in that apron with the book in my lap, and I cried harder than I had cried at the funeral.

When I was done, I got up and got the push broom and swept the whole floor, wall to wall. Then I wiped down the workbench. Then I went in the house and went to bed.