The Parts Man and His Notebooks

Brady told me on a Tuesday in the middle of September, in the office that had been his father’s for forty years, with the door shut and the old window air conditioner rattling like it had a bolt loose.

He was sitting in Orrin’s chair. It was the same brown chair with the split in the left arm that Orrin had patched with black electrical tape sometime around the year 2000.

Brady had on a new navy polo shirt with the dealership patch sewn over the pocket. He had bought a dozen of them when he took over in August, one for every man on the floor.

“Sit down, Dennis,” he said, and I sat, because I had sat in that same spot a thousand times to go over orders with his dad.

He had a sheet of paper in front of him, upside down so I couldn’t read it. He kept putting his hand flat on it, like it might blow away.

“I’m making some changes,” he said. “Starting November first, the parts counter goes to twenty-four hours a week. That’s you. Three days.”

I waited for the rest of it. With Brady, even as a boy, there was usually a rest of it, and he usually said the hard part last.

“The insurance goes with full time,” he said. “So that ends October thirty-first. You’ll get the COBRA paperwork in the mail. I checked.”

I said, “Patty’s surgery is November nineteenth.”

He knew that. Everybody in our town knew that. It had been on the prayer list at First Lutheran for three Sundays running, right under the Hendersons’ new baby.

Brady is my cousin Orrin’s boy. He has eaten at our Thanksgiving table every year of his life. Patty taught him to tie his shoes on our back step when he was five years old.

He looked down at the desk for a long time. Then he said the thing I have heard in my head maybe ten thousand times since.

“Dennis, at your age you should be glad to have a job.”

I was fifty-six years old. I had run the parts counter at Thorson Implement for twenty-seven years. I had started there the spring Brady was four.

I can tell you which bearing fits a forty-year-old grain drill without looking it up. I can tell you the belt length on half the combines in Stevens County by the sound the farmer makes describing it over the phone.

I wanted to say all of that. I could feel it sitting right behind my teeth, all twenty-seven years of it lined up and ready to go.

I didn’t say it. I have never been much for saying things in a room with a closed door, and my father wasn’t either.

What I said was, “Thank you for telling me straight, Brady.”

He looked up like I had slapped him. I think he had been ready for a fight, and he did not know what to do with a man who would not give him one.

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s it,” I said. “I’ve got Orville waiting on sickle sections.”

And I got up and went back out to the counter, because it was the second week of soybeans, and Orville Hagen was standing there in his John Deere cap with his hands in his jacket pockets, waiting on me like he had been waiting on me since 1999.

“Five sections and two of the rivets,” Orville said. “That rock pile on the east eighty ate my cutter bar again.”