The Credit My Boss Took at My Retirement

Chapter 6

On Tuesday morning at ten after six, a pickup I knew very well turned in at our mailbox.

I was on the porch in my robe with my first coffee. It was a gray morning with the first real smell of fall in it, dry leaves and diesel from the elevator down the road.

The truck belonged to Dee Pruitt, who ran the scale house at Reinholt’s for thirty-three years. She is a small woman with a gray braid down her back and a smoker’s laugh, and she can watch a loaded truck cross the scale and tell you within forty pounds what is in it.

She had a tarp tied over the bed. Something square and heavy was under it.

“Put a pot of coffee on, Gail,” she said. “I need you sitting down.”

We sat at my kitchen table with the back door open. Dale came in from the shed, took one look at us, and quietly refilled both mugs.

“Six weeks ago I was driving by on a Thursday afternoon,” Dee said. “I saw two boys from maintenance rolling a cart out to the dumpster behind the shop. I stopped. They said, Mr. Tolliver told us to take the whole file room.”

“Dee.”

“I have been the person in that company who knew where things were for thirty-three years. I do not know how to watch a cart of files go to a dumpster and keep driving.”

Her eyes were red around the edges.

“I told those boys I was authorized. I wasn’t. I lied to two nineteen-year-olds with a straight face. I backed my husband’s truck up to the dock, loaded what I could, and put it in the machine shed behind my house.”

I could not speak.

“The dumpster got some,” she said. “But I have six boxes. The route books back to the first year. The signed standing orders, the originals, with every farm’s signature. Your receivable ledgers. And two hundred of your ration cards that were in a scale house drawer nobody ever opened.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you’d have told me to put it back.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “And because I wanted to see what he’d do. I’m not usually wrong about a man’s load, Gail.”

She and Dale carried the boxes in two at a time and stacked them on my kitchen floor, old banker’s boxes with soft corners and the Reinholt stamp on the side.

I lifted the lid off the first one.

The top sheet was a delivery route in my handwriting, thirty years old, with a coffee ring on the corner. Under it, a signed order in blue ballpoint. Under that, another. Hollister. Brandt. Kovar. Ferris. Voss.

I put my hand over my mouth.

“There’s something else,” Dee said. “But you’ll want to hear it from the boy. He hasn’t been sleeping.”

Chapter 7

Arlen Voss called me on Wednesday. He is eighty-five and treats a telephone like a hot stove, so when it rang I thought it was a wrong number.

“Gail. It’s Arlen. I left early Friday.”

“I noticed.”

“I got halfway out of my chair, and Lois took hold of my belt. She said if I opened my mouth in front of that boy she’d have to drive me home from the sheriff’s office. I’m sorry I left.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “You were right. Thank you.”

“I’m not calling to apologize,” Arlen said. “I want you in my kitchen on a Thursday morning two weeks from now, at ten. Bring nothing. Say nothing unless somebody asks you a question.”

“What happens Thursday morning two weeks from now?”

I could hear a cow on his end, and a screen door creak.

“A man from Plains Valley is riding a route,” he said. “My nephew heard it at the elevator. They’re finishing at my place, because I’m the oldest in the program and Brad Tolliver wants the oldest customer to say nice things.”

“Arlen.”

“I called the man’s office myself on Monday. I said I’d be glad to have him at my table. His secretary said that would be wonderful.”

“I don’t want a fight. I couldn’t bear anybody fighting for me.”

“Nobody’s fighting anybody. I’m not going to say one unkind word about that boy. I’m going to answer what I’m asked. That’s all farmers do.”

I sat there with the receiver in my hand and the boxes still stacked against the wall.

“One more thing,” he said, and his voice changed. “You never ate a lemon bar at my table thirty years ago. You were too nervous. Lois still thinks about it. She’s baking a pan for Thursday.”

I could not answer that for a moment.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“Wear your good cardigan.”