The Parts Man and His Notebooks

I meant that. I want people to understand that I was not making a point. I was not leaving Brady a trap or a puzzle. I was leaving him what was his.

Orville didn’t say anything for a while. Then he reached across the counter and shook my hand. His hand was hard as a board and dry as paper, and he held on.

“You know where I live,” he said again.

I looked over at the office doorway. Brady was still standing there. He didn’t come out. He didn’t say goodbye, or thank you, or anything at all.

I took my coat off the hook by the back door where it had hung since 1999, and I walked out to my pickup and drove home. I didn’t look back at the store. I was afraid of what my face would do if I did.

Patty met me at the door.

She had been watching for my truck from the kitchen window. She opened the storm door before I got up the steps, and she put her arms around my neck and held on a long time.

She didn’t say a word. Her cheek was wet against my neck. She held on so long that the cold air came in around us and the furnace kicked on behind her.

I have been married to that woman thirty-one years, and I don’t think she ever said more to me than she said that night by not saying anything at all.

The next week was the longest week of my life.

I filled out the COBRA election form and set it on the counter by the door. Patty said we had sixty days to send it in, and it would cover us all the way back to the first of November. We’d mail it the day before the surgery if that was what it took.

I had already called the county highway shop. The foreman was a man I had sold parts to for twenty years. He said the job was mine, starting November seventeenth, with insurance the first of December.

Insurance the first of December. Two weeks after the surgery. COBRA would have to carry us through November, and I sat in the kitchen looking at the number.

On Thursday, November sixth, the weather turned. The radio said six to ten inches of snow by morning, with wind. Every farmer in the county with corn still standing was running every combine he had, trying to beat it in.

I didn’t know it then, but at about three o’clock that afternoon, Orville Hagen’s combine went down in the middle of his south field with three hundred acres of corn still standing.

It was the feeder house drive. A bearing in the gearbox had gone out with a sound Orville said was like a coffee can full of gravel. His grandson Tyler, who farms with him, shut it down right away, and that is the only reason the whole gearbox was not ruined.

Tyler drove the bad bearing into town in a bread bag. Brady put the number in the computer. The computer said the part had been discontinued by the factory in 2014. No replacement listed. Not available.

Brady called the dealership in Alexandria and the one in Fargo. Same thing. Nobody had one. One of them said they could maybe order a whole new gearbox, three weeks out, for more than four thousand dollars.

Orville did not have three weeks. He had about eighteen hours before the snow.