The Credit My Boss Took at My Retirement

Chapter 2

People have asked me a hundred times why I did not stand up and tell the room the truth. My own daughter Annie asked it on the phone that night, and she is thirty-three, a nurse, and not afraid of anybody.

My honest answer is that I had nothing in my hands.

What a room needs is a reason to believe you over the man with the microphone and the title on his card. And six weeks before my party, I had watched my reasons go out the door in a rolling cart.

I drove home behind Dale’s pickup with the windows down and the smell of cut milo coming in, and I did not cry until I got to the mailbox.

Dale took the leftover cake out of my arms, set it on the hood of the truck, and held on to me a long time.

“Say the word,” he said finally. “I’ll go to his house tonight. I’ll be polite about it.”

“You were never polite a day in your life when somebody was wrong in front of you.”

“I’ll make an exception.”

I laughed, and then I cried a little more, and then we went in and ate cake off paper plates at the kitchen table, because it was a perfectly good cake.

“If I go after him tomorrow, the whole town will say Gail Lindgren got bitter on her way out the door,” I said. “That is what he is counting on. A woman of sixty-two, with her pension, who is leaving.”

“Are you going to let it go?”

I looked at the photograph on our refrigerator, the only one I keep there. It shows a very old man in bib overalls holding up a feed-store calendar, grinning, and a young woman in a cardigan beside him with her hair coming loose.

That young woman was me. The old man was Arlen Voss.

“No,” I said. “But I’m not going to be loud about it either. I have to think.”

Chapter 3

You cannot understand what Brad took without understanding what the Standing Order Program is, so I will tell it plainly, the way I would at a kitchen table.

When I started at Reinholt’s, thirty-one years ago this March, the company sold feed by the ton to anybody who drove up to the dock with a check.

That worked for the big dairies. It did not work for the little places, and around Harlow in those years there were dozens of them. Thirty cows. Sixty sows. A couple hundred hens and a few steers on the side.

They did not fail because feed cost too much. I figured that out my first winter, doing the receivables by hand.

They failed because of timing. A dairyman is paid once a month. A hog man is paid when the hogs sell. A wheat man is paid in July. Feed has to be bought every week.

So they borrowed from the bank, and the interest ate the profit, and the first bad year they sold the cows.

In my second year, the big cooperative to the south quit delivering to anybody under a certain size. Eleven farms in our own township lost their supplier in one month.

“Can’t make money on the little ones, Gail,” old Walt Reinholt told me. “Never could.”

I went home and told Dale I thought I knew how.

Then I built it.

Each farm gets a ration card, an index card in a tin box at my desk, with its animal counts, its mix, and its delivery day. A Reinholt truck comes on a fixed route, every second Tuesday or every second Thursday, and unloads without anyone having to call.