The Pay at the Sale Barn Cafe

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” I said.

The next sale day was Wednesday. That gave us four days to change our minds. Neither one of us did.

Wednesday morning came up cold and gray with the wind out of the north. It was the first real norther of the year.

My mother came over at six to get the kids to school, and she hugged me at the door and did not ask where we were going, because she already knew.

I wore my denim jacket and jeans and my good boots. I left my long wavy blond hair down because I did not have the hands to do anything else with it that morning, they were shaking so bad.

Travis wore his straw hat even though it was November, because his felt hat had been knocked off and stepped on at the pens and he had not replaced it.

The sale barn sits on the highway east of town, a big metal building with pens out back that run for what looks like a quarter mile.

On sale day the parking lot fills up with pickups and stock trailers by six. You can smell the feedyards on the wind from ten miles off, and the old men will tell you that is the smell of money.

The cafe is inside the barn at the front, past the office.

It has wood-paneled walls that have been there since the seventies, and a counter with red stools, and booths along the windows, and one long table along the wall where the same men have sat for longer than I have been alive.

We walked in at twenty minutes to seven. The cafe was full the way it always is on sale day, loud with talk about calf prices and rain and whose wheat had come up. The windows were bright with early light.

Don Hollister sat at the near end of the long table, right where I knew he would be. Felt hat, tan canvas jacket, white mustache over his coffee cup.

A row of cattlemen in hats sat on both sides of him over plates of eggs. Some of those men I knew from the clinic. Some I had known since I was a girl.

Down at the far end sat Hank Riggs. Hank is seventy-four. He has called the sale at that barn for forty years and owns half of it, and the men at that table listen to him the way you listen to weather on the radio.

The talk at the table did not stop all at once. It went down one man at a time, like lights going off in a house.

By the time Don looked up from his coffee, the only sound in the room was the grill hissing behind the counter.

“Morning, Mr. Hollister,” I said.

He looked at me, and then at Travis, and then at the cast. “Casey. Travis.” He nodded at the sling. “How’s the arm?”

“Healing,” Travis said.

I kept my voice low. I did not need to raise it. The room had gone quiet enough that I could hear the man two seats down from Don set his cup back on its saucer.

“Mr. Hollister,” I said, “Travis worked every day of October. He worked the day he broke his arm, until three in the afternoon. You kept thirty-two hundred dollars of that. I’m asking for it now, please.”