The Pay at the Sale Barn Cafe

“I was wrong,” he said. He said it loud enough for the whole table. “I was wrong, son. I’m sorry. That was your money and I knew it was your money.”

Travis took the check with his left hand and put it in his shirt pocket.

Then Don put out his right hand to shake, the way men do, and stopped halfway, because of the cast. For a second neither one of them knew what to do.

Then Travis reached across himself and took Don’s right hand with his left, an awkward, backwards handshake, and held it. Don put his other hand on Travis’s good shoulder and kept it there.

“I’ll tell you why, and then I’ll shut up,” Don said, quieter now. “The bank cut my line in August. Two dry years. I sold off half my cows last summer because I couldn’t buy hay at those prices. I’ve been borrowing against my own place to make payroll for you and Mike.”

He swallowed. “When you got hurt, I sat in my truck that night and told myself you owed me the days. I knew better. I told myself anyway, because it was easier than calling the bank again.”

“You could have told me that,” Travis said. “I’d have helped you, Don. You know I would. I’d have waited on the money if you’d asked me to. You didn’t ask. You just kept it.”

“I know it,” Don said. “That’s the part I’m ashamed of.”

Nobody at the long table said anything. The man who had loaned Don the pen looked down at his eggs.

Another one, an older man named Bill I knew from church, reached over and put a hand on Don’s empty chair and pulled it back out for him, like an invitation to sit back down.

Don did not sit. He said, “Casey, I’m sorry it took you coming in here. That’s on me, not you. You did right.”

Then he picked up his coffee, and he went and sat by himself in a booth by the window.

I will not lie and say I felt good. I felt like I was going to be sick.

I had stood up in front of the men I had known since I was a girl and asked a man I liked for money, and he had given it to me, and now he was sitting alone in a booth.

Travis put his good hand on the small of my back and said, “Let’s go, Case.” And we turned around to go.

That was when Hank Riggs stood up from the end of the table.

Hank is not a big man anymore. He walks with a cane now. But when Hank Riggs stands up in that cafe, people notice, and they noticed.

He came down the length of the long table with his cane and stopped in front of us.

He did not say anything to me at first. He looked at Travis’s cast, plain and white from his wrist to his elbow, and he tapped it with one finger.

“Nobody’s signed that yet?” he asked.

“My kids are waiting on it,” Travis said. “The doctor finally gave the word. Tonight’s the night.”

“Then tell them to draw something good,” Hank said. “A man ought to have something good on his arm.”

Then he walked over to the register and said something to the girl working it, and he took out his billfold and laid down some bills.

He came back and said, “Your breakfast is paid for. Sit down and eat it. You came in here hungry and you’re not leaving that way.”