The Pay at the Sale Barn Cafe

Emma went first, with a purple marker, in her careful second-grade printing.

She wrote “Daddy is brave” and drew a heart, then thought about it and drew a second, smaller heart next to it, which she said was for Jake because he could not write yet.

Jake did not want a heart. Jake wanted to draw a horse.

He took the brown marker and drew a long body and four legs and a big round sun over it, and when Travis asked whose horse it was, Jake said, “Yours. When your arm works.”

Travis looked down at that horse for a long time. Then he said, “That’s a good horse, buddy. That’s exactly the horse I want.” I had to go fold laundry in the other room for a while.

When Emma got home from school on Thursday, I told her the house payment was made. She looked at me very seriously and said, “Do you need the pig?”

“No, baby,” I said. “We don’t need the pig. Daddy got his pay.”

She went back to her room and put the rubber stopper back in the pig. I heard it squeak into place from the hall.

Travis started at the sale barn the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. He stood in the alley in his straw hat and his good boots with a clipboard tucked under his cast, and he worked the gates with his left arm, and he called the pen numbers up to the scale house in a voice that carried the length of the barn.

Don came by the house a week before Christmas.

He drove up in his truck at about four in the afternoon and sat in the drive for a minute before he got out. He was carrying a ham, the same kind he sent every year.

Jean had made a pecan pie and sent it too, in a glass dish, with a note on top that said “Return the dish when you can, love, Jean.”

He did not come in at first. He stood on the porch with his hat in his hand and said to Travis, “I wanted to tell you in front of your family what I told you in front of the whole cafe. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’ve been sorry every day.”

Travis said, “You told me already, Don.”

“I know it,” Don said. “I wanted to say it here too. A thing like that you ought to say twice.”

Then Jake came out on the porch in his socks and looked up at Don and said, “Did you see my horse?” And he grabbed Travis’s arm and pulled the cast down so Don could see it.

Don crouched down on that cold porch, at sixty-six, with his knees popping, and looked at the brown horse with the sun over it for a long time.

He asked Jake what the horse’s name was. Jake said he had not named it yet. Don said a good horse should have a good name and Jake should take his time.

Then Don said something I did not expect. He asked Jake if he could sign the cast too.

Jake looked up at his daddy. Travis nodded. So Jake ran inside and came back with the brown marker, and Don Hollister signed my husband’s cast right underneath the horse, in his big slanting rancher’s hand. He wrote, “Don. Sorry, partner. Come back in March.”

I saw Travis read it. I saw his jaw work, the way it does.