The Sack Breakfast in the Bread Box

At five I was at the post. At ten after, Tyler came out of the dark with Thursday’s sack folded flat in his hand. He held it out to me like a receipt.

“Mrs. Lindgren keeps these,” he said. “I don’t know if you want them.”

“I want them,” I said. I put it in my coat pocket. Then I handed him the new sack, and he unrolled the top right there and looked in, which he had not done before.

“These look right,” he said, surprised.

“Third time,” I said. “Even a lineman learns.”

He laughed. It changed his whole face. For a second he looked fourteen.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Where’s your mom?”

The laugh went out of him. He looked down the road toward town, then back at me.

“She left,” he said. “Summer before last. She went to Sioux Falls with a guy. She calls on Christmas.”

“And it’s you and your grandpa.”

“Yes sir.” He said it like he was telling me the weather. “Grandpa gets his Social Security and I get my mill pay. I cover the light bill and the propane. He covers the rest.”

The light bill. For a man on an oxygen machine that runs all day and all night. I knew to the dollar what that machine costs to run in a month, because I had helped write the brochure on it for the co-op.

“You walk the two miles every morning,” I said.

“Grandpa’s truck needs a fuel pump. I’m saving for it.” He shifted the sack under his arm. “I have to go. I’m on the dock at six.”

“Go on,” I said. “Tyler.”

He turned back.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. You working?”

“Six to noon.”

“Box’ll be full,” I said.

He nodded, and walked off fast, and I did not watch him this time. I went up to the house and put Thursday’s folded sack into Jen’s Bible, at the back, in Revelation, with the others.

Saturday evening, when I got home from seeing Jen, I drove out the township road past the Lutheran cemetery and knocked on Ed Haas’s door.

I had told myself I was going over to look at the truck. I had my tools in the back. I told myself a lot of things that week.

Ed answered the door himself, slow, with the oxygen line over his ears and the tubing trailing back into the front room, where the machine hummed in the corner. He is seventy-four, a big man gone thin. He farmed rented ground out there for forty years.

“Wade Lindgren,” he said. “Tyler’s at the library. Come in.”

His front room was clean and cold. He kept the thermostat at sixty-two, I noticed, and a wool blanket over his chair. On the wall was a picture of Tyler in a Lake Crystal football uniform, maybe ninth grade, already too thin for it.

“I came about the truck,” I said.

“No, you didn’t,” Ed said. He lowered himself into his chair, and the machine sighed with him. “You came about your wife.”

We sat there a while. I did not know how to start, and he did not help me.

Finally I said, “She never told me who it was. Two years. I thought it was a hired man.”

Ed looked at me a long time.