The Tools That Came Home Early

“All right,” I said.

I said it so softly he took it for surrender.

The Pates’ tank was on my list that day, a 500-gallon tank behind the house, and it read 22 percent. I want to be plain about what I did next, because it was not kindness and it was not spite. I walked around the house, pulled the hose, set the meter, and filled it to eighty percent, the same as I would have done for anybody. A tank at 22 percent in late October does not care who sold what. The ones who would be cold in that house were Teri and the boy. I wrote the ticket and hung it on the back door.

Then I sat at the end of the drive with the engine running and called the law.

The sheriff’s office in Barton put me through to Deputy Nick Radford, who was in my wife Leann’s Sunday school class as a boy and who helped carry Heath’s casket. He listened to the whole thing. He was quiet a while.

“Kenny, I hate this,” he said. “Is Rudy on the title?”

I closed my eyes. “Teri put him on it in the spring. For the insurance.”

“Then it’s his to sell. And the tools sat in a shed on a place they both own. I can go out there and talk to him. I can make him feel about two inches tall. But I can’t take a thing off Reuben Haldane’s lot, and I can’t take it off Gil Fogle’s trailer. It’s a civil matter, if it’s anything. You’d need a judge, and a judge is a month.”

“Landon gets off the bus at 3:49,” I said.

“I know it,” said Nick. “I’m sorry.”

I believed him. Nobody in that business had broken a law you could write a ticket for.

I hung up and sat with my hands on the wheel for about a minute. Then I called Teri.

She picked up on the fifth ring. I could hear a hospital behind her, the hum and the soft shoes.

Her sister Vicki had a hip replaced Tuesday in Sioux Falls and was not mending right. Teri had driven the three and a half hours across the state, packed a bag, left Landon with Rudy and a list on the refrigerator. She was supposed to be home Sunday.

I told her as gently as I could.

For a long time there was nothing. Then I heard her cover the phone with her hand, and a sound I will not describe.

“He sold the truck,” she said when she came back. “He sold Heath’s truck.”

“And the box. The whole shop.”

“Kenny, Heath said sixteen. He said it at the table.”

“I know he did.”

“I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there by three.”

“Teri.” I made myself slow down. “Vicki needs you today. The nurse said so herself. Let me work on it. I’ve got a plan, and it’s a better one than you driving 90 miles an hour with your head full of this.”

“What plan?”

I told her.

She was quiet again. Then she said, flat and small: “Do you think they’ll do it?”

“I think they promised Heath,” I said. “I was there.”

Heath was 47 when they found it, a mass on his pancreas the size of a plum. He lived four more months. He spent the first one angry and the other three the most peaceful I ever saw him.