The Credit My Boss Took at My Retirement

Chapter 9

I wore my good cardigan, the sage-colored one Annie gave me for Christmas. I drove myself, because Dale had a job to finish and because I wanted to arrive alone.

The Voss place sits on a hill at the end of a gravel lane, with a white house, a red barn that needs paint, and a row of old cottonwoods along the creek. In October they go yellow. I have thought it the prettiest sight in the county for thirty years.

Lois met me at the door. She is eighty-one. She put her arms around me and said nothing, which for Lois is a speech.

The kitchen smelled like coffee and lemon. On the table, on a blue-and-white cloth, sat a plate stacked high with bars dusted in sugar.

Arlen was at the head of the table in a pressed shirt buttoned to the neck. In front of him lay a calendar page, brown with age, the pencil on it faded to the color of a wasp’s nest.

“Sit,” he said. “There.”

I sat at the end by the stove. Lois poured my coffee. I held the mug in both hands and kept my mouth shut.

At ten past ten we heard tires on the gravel. Brad’s white truck with the Reinholt logo, and behind it a gray sedan, and out of the sedan a man in a canvas jacket and boots that had actually been in a barn.

That was Tom Ostrander, the field man for Plains Valley. About fifty-five, sunburned hands, a patient squint. He had spent thirty years in grain and feed, and I could tell he had walked more than one kitchen floor.

Kyle came last, carrying a laptop bag. He did not look at me. He looked at the dirt.

Brad came through the door already talking.

“Mr. Voss, what a pleasure. Tom, this is Arlen, our longest-standing customer, a real pillar. Arlen, tell Tom what the Standing Order Program has meant to your operation these last two years, since we launched.”

Then he saw me.

I watched it cross his face in stages. First puzzlement. Then something quick and cold. Then a new smile, pulled on over the top like a man putting a coat over a stain.

“Gail. What a surprise.”

“Lois baked,” I said. “I came for a lemon bar.”

Arlen cleared his throat. “Sit down, gentlemen. Mr. Ostrander, I’m told you want to know how this program works.”

“I do,” said Ostrander. He looked at the lemon bars, and at me, and took one.

“It started at this table,” Arlen said.

“Historically, Arlen, the earlier version of the program,” Brad began.

“Son.” Arlen did not raise his voice. He has never needed to. “I’ve been farming this ground since before your mother was in diapers. I’d like to finish.”

Brad closed his mouth.

Arlen turned the calendar page around and set it in front of Ostrander.

“Thirty years ago this March I owed Reinholt’s nineteen hundred dollars. Walt Reinholt told his bookkeeper to cut me off. She didn’t. She drove out here on a Saturday, ate nothing, and sat where she’s sitting now, and she told me she’d found a way to keep a small man in business. She wrote it on that. In pencil. She signed it, I signed it. That is the first Standing Order there ever was.”