The Parts Man and His Notebooks

Patty looked at me across the table for a long time. She has a way of looking at me that makes me feel like she can see all the way to the back of my head.

“All right,” she said finally. “Then what are you going to do?”

“Work,” I said. “It’s harvest. They need me at that counter more the next six weeks than any other six weeks of the year. I’m not leaving anybody stranded in a field to prove a point.”

“And after harvest?”

“After harvest, I’ll find something with insurance. The co-op in Morris is always looking. The county highway shop. Somebody will take a man who knows parts.”

“At your age,” Patty said quietly, and I could tell she was sorry the minute it was out, because her face crumpled.

I got up and came around the table and put my arms around her from behind, with my chin on the top of her head. Her hair smelled like the lilac shampoo our daughter sends her every Christmas.

“At my age,” I said, “I know where every part in this county is. That has to be worth something to somebody.”

She held onto my wrist with both hands. Her hands were cold. They had been cold since spring, because of the valve, and I had gotten used to warming them up in mine.

We didn’t say anything else that night. We didn’t have to.

Harvest came on hard that fall. The beans dried down fast in the last week of September, and then everybody went straight into corn with hardly a day in between.

I opened the store at six every morning, an hour before the posted time, so that nobody sat in a field with a broken belt waiting on me to finish my coffee.

I took calls at supper. Patty would hand me the phone across the table without a word, and I would write the part number on a napkin and tell the man I’d have it on the counter at six.

One night in early October, the Swenson boys broke a feeder chain on their combine at nine o’clock with rain coming in by morning. I drove the chain out to their field myself at ten at night and held the flashlight while they put it on.

I did not do that for Brady. I want to be clear. I did it for the Swensons, and for Orville, and for every farmer in Stevens County who had called that counter and heard my voice for twenty-seven years.

I didn’t put in for overtime on the extra hours. Patty thought I was a fool for that, and she may have been right.

Brady was in the office most of that fall with the door shut. That was not like his dad. Orrin ran the store from the counter, leaning on his elbows, talking about the weather with whoever came in.

Brady ran it from the phone. I could hear him through the wall sometimes, not the words, just the sound of a man trying to keep his voice level and not managing it.

Twice that month a man in a suit came from the bank in Morris and sat in the office with him for two hours.

I noticed. I didn’t ask. I figured it was his business, and I figured I’d find out what I needed to know when I needed to know it. That is a habit I have had my whole life, and it is not always a good one.