The Parts Man and His Notebooks

She took her glasses off and set them on the table, very carefully, the way she does when she is trying not to cry.

“Oh, Dennis,” she said. “Twenty-seven years.”

“I know it.”

“What are we going to do about the insurance?”

That was the real question. The rest of it was just my pride.

Patty is the organized one in our house. Before I had my boots off, she had the folder with all her heart papers out on the table, and the insurance booklet from the dealership, and a yellow legal pad.

She called the number on the back of her card. She sat on hold for twenty minutes listening to the same song, and then she asked the woman on the line every question I would never have thought of.

When she hung up, she wrote it all down for me in her neat schoolteacher printing, the way she used to write spelling words on the board for the third grade.

COBRA would let us keep the exact same plan. Same card, same surgeon in Fargo, same hospital. For up to eighteen months.

But once the dealership stopped paying its share, we would pay all of it, plus a little extra for the paperwork. For the two of us, that came to $1,840 a month.

“On twenty-four hours,” Patty said, tapping the pad with her pen, “that’s most of what you would bring home.”

She was right. I made twenty-four dollars an hour. Three days a week, after taxes, the COBRA would eat nearly every check and leave us the grocery money if we were careful.

“What about one of those marketplace plans?” I said. “The state one. The Hendersons’ girl is on one.”

“I asked her about that too,” Patty said. “We could do it. But we already met our six-thousand-dollar deductible this year with all my tests. A new plan starts the deductible over. And I’d have to make sure my surgeon takes it, two months before they open me up.”

She put the pen down.

“I am not changing surgeons, Dennis. I just got used to this one.”

“I know,” I said. “Nobody’s asking you to.”

Then Patty said what I knew she would say.

“Call Orrin.”

“No.”

“Dennis. He’s your cousin. He hired you. He would never have let this happen.”

“It’s not his store anymore,” I said. “He signed it over to Brady in August. A man does not go around his boss to the boss’s daddy. Not in this town. Not ever.”

“Even when the boss is wrong?”

“Especially then,” I said. “If I call Orrin, everybody in town knows by Sunday that Brady can’t run his own store. I’m not doing that to him. He’s family too.”

I want to be honest here, because Patty was not wrong, and I have thought about it many times since.

Part of what I said was decency. But part of it was pride. I did not want to be the fifty-six-year-old man calling his retired cousin to complain that the boy had cut his hours. I did not want to need anybody.

Orrin had finally gone to the lake. After forty years of opening that store six days a week, he had bought a little place on a lake up by Alexandria, with a dock and a pontoon, and he was learning to fish for walleye like a man who had never had a day off in his life. Which he hadn’t.

I was not going to ruin that for him with one phone call. That is what I told myself, anyway.