The Coffee Pot at the Feed Store

The third Monday

The third Monday was cold. The first real frost had come overnight, and the beans were all in, and the corn was going fast. The men came in stamping their boots and blowing on their hands.

A little after five, the bell rang, and it was not a farmer.

It was Ryan Hollis. Alone. No apron, no jacket over his flannel, like he had walked out of the cafe without deciding to.

The whole store went quiet. Eleven men with mugs halfway to their mouths. Leonard Pruitt on his bucket. Dale behind the register with a pencil in his hand.

Ryan stood there a second. Then he walked over to the stack of feed against the counter, sat down on a sack of layer pellets, and took his cap off and held it in both hands.

“Deb,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”

I set the carafe down. “Go ahead.”

He looked at the floor. He was thirty-three years old and he looked about fifteen.

“Would you teach me,” he said, “who takes what?”

Nobody moved.

“I’ve been standing at that window for three weeks,” he said. “I’ve been doing the numbers every night. And I finally figured out I’ve been doing the wrong numbers.” He turned his cap around in his hands.

“Brooke’s grandma left us every dollar she had. A hundred and eighty thousand. She taught school for forty years to save it. If we lose that place, we lose all of it, and I don’t know how Brooke lives with that.”

He looked up at me then.

“We thought the brunch would save it. We thought we needed new people. We never figured out we already had people.” He nodded around at the men. “These are the people. And I don’t know a single one of their names.”

It was so quiet I could hear Joan’s urn ticking as it cooled.

“I’m sorry for what Brooke said to you,” Ryan said. “She’s sorry too. She wanted to come, but she’s been crying since Wednesday and she didn’t think she could get through it. That’s not on you. It’s on us.”