The Day the VFW Filled the Showroom

“I’d like to see it parked at your place before I go,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

We did not go out in a parade. Albert Mayhew was getting restless in his chair, so Easton took him out to the pickup first. Hank Reisner said he would drive my Grand Marquis, and Vern said he would follow in his, and the rest of them stood up from the chairs by the window one at a time, the way men leave church, and straightened the seats behind them.

I drove the Silverado myself. It was the first time I had sat in it with the engine running since September. I put the thermos on the passenger seat and pressed the little plastic soldier back onto the dash with my thumb, and it held. Dustin followed in the minivan with his wife Shelby driving and Emma in her car seat, and Vern behind them, the eleven miles down County Road 14 at forty-five miles an hour in the middle of a Saturday.

In my driveway I left the engine running, and the three of us stood around it in the cold, Dustin and Vern and I. Nobody said much. I gave Emma a piece of coffee cake in a paper napkin for the ride home.

Todd called that night. I told him all of it and he was quiet for a long time.

“I’d have liked to see Kessler’s face,” he said.

“You wouldn’t have liked it,” I said. “He looked about sixty.”

On the following Friday, Dustin Rehm called me from the bank to say he had a cashier’s check for 22,400 dollars, and another for his in-laws, with interest. Stan had sold the bass boat and the camper. He had also, Rodney told me, refunded the 450 dollars Ryan had prepaid and added 3,000 for the months Ryan went without his truck. The 500-dollar check he asked me to tear up. I did.

I called Deputy Roper that same afternoon. I told him there was a folder with Ryan’s name signed on a title by somebody who was not Ryan, and that Rodney Brandt was willing to hand it over. Gary Roper was quiet on the phone a moment and then said, “Mrs. Tuttle, that’s not a civil matter.” He drove out to the dealership himself on Monday. The prosecutor in the county seat charged Stan with forgery on the title, and in March he pleaded to a lesser count. The state licensing board suspended his dealer license for a year, and he got two years of probation and a restitution order he had already paid.

The Booster Club took the Kessler Motors sign off the football scoreboard and left the bolt holes empty, and everybody noticed every Friday night. The banner on the lot came down that Sunday.

Rodney Brandt put in his notice the next Monday and took a job running the books at the farm co-op in the next county, and he took Bobby Bauer with him at a better wage. On his last day he sat at my kitchen table and told me he should have walked into the sheriff’s office the day he found the envelope. I gave him a piece of pie, and he ate all of it.