The Truck Money He Owed Me

The happy dollar

Then Doc did something I didn’t understand at the time. He took his billfold out of his back pocket, opened it, and took out a dollar.

He walked down the length of the table with it, past all those men, slow on his bad knees.

At the end of the table, on the sideboard by the coffee pots, there was a big glass pickle jar. Rotary called it the happy dollar jar.

If you had good news to share, you put in a dollar and said it out loud, and the money went to the club’s scholarship fund.

Doc put his dollar in the jar.

“I’m happy,” he said to the room, “to report that Tyler Vance is home safe from the United States Army. And that he showed up when he said he would. Which is rarer than you’d think.”

Then he walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the door, the way he used to turn Pete out of the kitchen when the dog got underfoot.

“Come on, son,” he said. “You haven’t had breakfast, and you’re not going to get any here.”

I looked back once from the doorway. Glenn was sitting there with both hands in his lap, looking at nothing.

Not one man at that table was looking at him, and that, I think, was worse for him than anything anyone could have said.

The drawer

Doc drove me to his house in his old green Buick, because neither of us wanted to walk down Main Street right then.

The yard was too long. I noticed it the way you notice a picture hanging crooked.

“Nobody’s mowed it right since you left,” Doc said, catching me looking. “I hired the Peterson boy. He’s a good kid. He misses the north fence every week.”

He made eggs and toast in his kitchen, which still had his wife’s yellow curtains, and poured me coffee in a mug with a cow on it.

I hadn’t known I was hungry until the plate was in front of me.

When I was done, he got up and went to the drawer by the phone, the junk drawer every kitchen in Nebraska has, full of rubber bands and dead batteries and twist ties, and came back with a folded piece of poster board.

He unfolded it on the table in front of me. The creases were soft and brown from being folded so many years.

It was my flyer. Tyler Vance, Lawn Mowing and Trimming. Dependable. $20 a yard. Call after school. In my own careful fourteen-year-old marker.

“I took it off the feed store board that night,” Doc said. “Didn’t want anybody else calling you first. Selfish of me.”

I couldn’t say anything. I sat there and looked at that flyer and my eyes burned, and I was nineteen and had just finished Army training and I was about to cry in a retired veterinarian’s kitchen over a piece of poster board.

“Margaret thought it was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen,” Doc said quietly. His wife had died the winter before I turned sixteen.

“She made me keep it. She said, that boy is going to be somebody, and we’ll want to say we knew him first.”

He tapped the word Dependable with one finger.

“You spelled it right,” he said. “You’d be surprised. Half the grown men in this county can’t.”

I laughed, and that let the crying out too, and Doc just sat there and drank his coffee and let me do it and looked out the window at his long grass like it was the most interesting thing in the world.