The Parts Man and His Notebooks

Brady had cut more than just me. Kevin, the younger of our two mechanics, went to four days. The girl who did the books part time went from three days to two. Brady quit buying the coffee and donuts on Saturday mornings that Orrin had bought for thirty years.

Around the middle of October I knocked on the office door and went in.

Brady looked up from a stack of papers. He looked tired. He had a cut on his chin from shaving too fast, and his polo shirt was the same one he had worn the day before.

“I wanted to tell you,” I said, “I won’t be staying on at twenty-four hours. I’ll work through the end of the month, through harvest, full time like we agreed. After that I’m going to take the county highway shop job. It’s full time, with insurance.”

He put his pen down. For a second he looked like the four-year-old who used to sit on an upside-down bucket by my counter and sort the cotter pins by size for a quarter.

He opened his mouth. I thought he was going to say something real.

Then he closed it again and looked back down at the papers.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

But he didn’t look at me when he said it. I noticed that too, and I filed it away with the man from the bank.

My last day was Friday, October thirty-first. Halloween. The kids from the grade school came through Main Street that afternoon in their costumes, and I gave out the little packs of peanuts we keep by the register.

The corn was a little over half out by then. Most of the beans were in. It had been a good harvest, all things considered, and nobody in our part of the county had lost a day to a part we couldn’t find.

At about four o’clock, Orville came in. He wore the same green John Deere cap he has worn for as long as I can remember, sweat-stained at the brim, and he needed a box of shear bolts for his auger.

I got them off the shelf. He paid in cash. Then he stood there at the counter, the way he does when he has something to say and is waiting for the right moment.

I took my key ring out of my pocket. I worked the store keys off of it, the front door, the back door, the parts cage and the little brass one for the safe. Four keys. I had carried them for twenty-seven years.

Then I reached under the counter and took out the notebooks.

All seven of them. Brown leather, the corners worn through and the spines cracked from handling. I stacked them on the counter in order, 1999 on the bottom. The stack came up almost to my belt buckle, and the keys looked small on top.

I set the keys on top of the stack.

Brady was standing in the office doorway. I don’t know how long he had been there. He had his arms crossed, and his face had no color in it at all.

Orville looked at the stack. He looked at the keys, then at me.

“Dennis,” he said. “What are those?”

“Those are every part number this store ever got wrong,” I said. “And every old machine in the county, and what it takes.”

“You’re leaving those?”

“They belong to the store,” I said. “I wrote them on store time. Orrin bought every one of those ledgers for the store. It would be stealing to take them home.”