The Parts Man and His Notebooks

He looked at me then, for the first time all night.

“I went through every line, Dennis. Every single one. Your insurance and your hours were the biggest number I could move. If I cut the mechanics, nothing gets fixed. If I cut the lights, we close. You were the only number that was big enough.”

“You could have told me that,” I said. I said it quietly. I wasn’t angry anymore. I was mostly tired.

“I know it,” Brady said. “I know I could have. But if I told you, I had to tell you why. And if I told you why, the whole town would know by Sunday that Dad lost the store. I couldn’t do that to him.”

He put his hand flat on the first ledger.

“So I said the thing about your age instead. Because it was the meanest thing I could think of, and I figured if you were mad enough at me, you wouldn’t ask any questions.”

I sat back in my chair. I thought about what I had told Patty at that same table seven weeks earlier. A man does not go around his boss to the boss’s daddy. Not in this town. He’s family too.

Brady had been doing the exact same thing I had been doing. Protecting his father’s name. Keeping it in the family. Swallowing it so nobody would have to see.

Two Thorsons, both too proud to say the true thing out loud, and Patty paying for it with her heart surgery two months away.

Patty was standing at the counter by the coffeepot. She had not said a word through any of it. But I saw her face, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing.

But there was a sixty-one-year-old man with three hundred acres of corn in the field and snow coming, and that came first. Everything else could wait an hour.

“Where’s Orville now?” I asked.

“Home,” Brady said. “Tyler took him home. He’s sitting in his kitchen.”

I held out my hand. “Give me the ledger.”

Brady slid it across the table. I opened it to page forty-one without looking, the way you open your Bible to the Twenty-third Psalm.

“L.H. 99 FH,” I read out loud. “Orville Hagen, his 1999 combine, the feeder house. ‘See W. std.’ That means the bearing is a standard bearing, and the bearing supply in Willmar carries it under its own number. Here’s the number. They quit selling it under the factory number, but it is the same bearing. It always was.”

“Willmar’s closed,” Brady said. “It’s eight-thirty.”

“I know it. That’s the next part. ‘Also boneyard, ’96 trade, NE corner.’ That means there’s a combine your dad took on trade in 2009, same family as Orville’s, sitting out in the boneyard behind the shop in the northeast corner. Same gearbox. Same bearing. Nobody has touched that gearbox in seventeen years, and the combine was parked with the bearing good.”

Orrin let out a breath. “That old ’96. I forgot all about it.”

“That’s why I wrote it down,” I said.

I got my coat off the hook. Patty handed me my insulated bibs and my good gloves without being asked, and she put her hand on my cheek for a second.

“Go on,” she said. “I’ll keep the coffee on.”

We took Orrin’s truck. Brady rode in the middle. Nobody said much. The snow was coming harder by the time we got to the store, blowing sideways across the lot under the yard light.