The Truck I Sold For Payroll
The hour between
He had to drive to town to the bank and I had to sign the title over, and in the hour he was gone I stood in the office with Marie and did not feel the relief I thought I would.
“You’re really doing this,” Marie said.
“It’s done,” I said.
She took her glasses off and folded them. “Dale. What are you going to do about Shane.”
And there it was, the question I had been pushing in front of me all morning like a man pushing a stalled car. Because selling the truck solved five o’clock. It did not solve anything else. It did not put the eighteen thousand back. It did not un-sign the form in June. It did not answer for the fact that my partner, my wife’s brother, the boy I made a man, had been bleeding our shop for four months and looking me in the eye across the lunch table the whole time.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He’ll be in at noon,” Marie said. “He texted. Said he was running parts.”
Running parts. There it was again, the small ordinary lie, laid down so smooth you would never catch the seam.
“Marie,” I said. “When he comes in. I need you to not say anything. I need to do this right and I don’t know yet what right is.”
She looked at me a long time. Then she said the thing I did not know I needed to hear.
“My brother drank,” she said. “Years back. It’s not the same thing and it’s exactly the same thing. There’s a kind of trouble a person can’t just decide their way out of. Doesn’t excuse a dime of it. But you’ll want to remember it’s a sickness before you decide he’s just a thief. Both can be true.”
Roy came back a little before noon with the cash in a brown paper Hy-Vee sack rolled down at the top, because that is how a man carries money when he has just come from the bank and does not own a briefcase and never will.
We stood at Marie’s desk and counted it out, twenty two thousand seven hundred dollars in hundreds and fifties, and Marie counted it again after me because that is her job and her nature, and Roy signed where I showed him and I signed the title and handed him the two keys and the little plastic fob and the oil records in a folder with a rubber band around it.
He folded the title into his shirt pocket. Then he stood there a second.
“You raise those four men right,” he said, “and someday one of them does this for somebody.” And he got in my truck, my truck, and he adjusted the seat back for his longer legs, and he pulled out onto 63 and was gone, and I watched the dark blue of it go small and then disappear behind the propane tank, and I will not tell you my eyes were dry.
Marie put her hand on my arm.
“Go wash your face,” she said. “Shane’s pulling in.”