The Parts Man and His Notebooks

I didn’t have my keys. Brady unlocked the back door with the ring I had left on the counter, and he handed the ring to me without a word. I took it.

We got the tools from the shop and walked out to the boneyard behind the building, the three of us. The old trade-ins sat in two rows under the snow, rust-red and faded green, like cattle standing with their backs to the wind.

The ’96 was right where the ledger said it would be. Northeast corner, tires half flat, a bird’s nest in the cab.

Orrin held the flashlight. He couldn’t kneel anymore with his hip, so he stood over us and held that light steady for an hour and a half in the wind without once complaining.

Brady and I lay on our backs in the snow under that feeder house. I showed him how to break the bolts loose without rounding them, how to tap the bearing out without cracking the housing. He was good with his hands. He just hadn’t been shown.

At one point he stopped working and lay there looking up at the underside of that old machine.

“I’m sorry, Dennis,” he said. “About the age thing. About all of it. I’ve been sick about it since the day I said it.”

“I know you have,” I said. “I could tell. Hand me the punch.”

We got the bearing out a little before ten. It was clean and smooth and it turned without a sound. I wiped it off on my shirt and held it up in the flashlight, and Orrin laughed out loud, the first time I had heard him laugh since he retired.

We drove it out to Orville’s place. The yard light was on and his kitchen light was on. Orville came out on the porch in his slippers and his chore coat when he saw the truck.

He looked at me getting out of the pickup. Then he looked at Orrin and Brady. He didn’t ask a single question. He just nodded once, like a man whose prayer had been answered in the most ordinary way.

Tyler and Kevin the mechanic put the bearing in by the light of the shop that night. Orville’s combine was running at five in the morning. He got all but forty acres of that corn out before the worst of the snow came through, and the forty he got the next week.

At seven in the morning, Brady knocked on the door.

He had not slept. He was wearing the same clothes from the boneyard, and there was still snow melting off his boots.

He sat down at the kitchen table and put a piece of paper in front of me. It was not upside down this time.

“Full time,” he said. “Same hours you had. Same pay. Insurance. I called the agent at six-thirty this morning. Since you were only off the plan a week, she says she can put you and Patty back on the group effective the first of November. No gap. The surgery’s covered.”

Patty had come in from the living room in her robe. She sat down very slowly in the chair beside me.

“How?” I said. “The bank still wants their sixty thousand.”

“Dad’s selling the lake place,” Brady said. “He decided last night on the drive home. That pays the line down enough that the bank backs off. And I’m cutting my own pay in half for a year. That was the line I should have cut in the first place. I just didn’t want to look at it.”