The Shop Door Opened at Seven

Dale Comes Out

Dale came out on a Saturday afternoon, the first week of October.

I heard his truck before I saw it. It was a newer Ram, black, with his shop’s name on the door in red letters. He pulled into the gravel and parked next to our flatbed and sat in the cab a long time, the same way Arlo had.

Luke was inside running a bead on a broken bale spear. I was at the desk. I saw Dale through the open door and I got up and went and stood in it.

I was wearing Rick’s apron. I wore it every day by then. Dale got out of his truck. He did not come all the way to the door. He stopped about ten feet away, in the gravel, with his hands in his jacket pockets.

He looked older than I remembered. Gray in his beard. Tired around the eyes. He had the same jaw as Rick, the same way of standing with his weight on one foot.

“Shelly,” he said.

“Dale.”

“I suppose you’re pretty sore at me.”

“I called you twice,” I said. “You never called me back.”

“I know it.”

“You told the whole co-op we were closed. You told them I was selling the welders. You never once asked me.”

“I know it,” he said again.

I waited. I had decided long before that day that if he ever came out, I would not yell at him. Rick never yelled at anybody. I was not going to start on his brother.

“I figured you’d sell,” Dale said finally. “I figured a widow and a boy, in harvest, with a shop that size. I figured you’d go under by Thanksgiving, and you’d lose money, and his customers would end up going to somebody in Aberdeen who didn’t know them.

“I thought I’d take them. I thought that’s what Rick would want. Somebody in the family looking after his people.”

“You could have asked me.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He did not answer right away. He looked past me into the shop, at the workbench and the big Miller and the rack of steel, and at the bucket in the corner, upright now.

“Because I’d have had to come out here,” he said. His voice went rough. “I haven’t been in this shop since he died, Shelly. I couldn’t. I drove by it four or five times and couldn’t turn in.”

I did not say anything.

“He was my little brother,” Dale said. “I taught him to weld. Dad gave him the stinger and I stood behind him and showed him how to hold it. I was fourteen and he was twelve.

“And then he went and built this place out here and charged sixty dollars an hour and everybody loved him, and I put my name up on a big sign by the highway, and I don’t think he and I said ten real words to each other in fifteen years.”

He took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them.

“I didn’t know how to tell anybody I missed him,” he said. “So I went and took his customers instead. Isn’t that a sorry thing.”

“It is,” I said.