The Credit My Boss Took at My Retirement

Ostrander bent over the page. I watched his lips move. Half at delivery. Half at the milk check. Every second Tuesday. G. Lindgren, for Reinholt’s.

He read it twice. Then he said softly, “Who is G. Lindgren?”

“That would be the lady with the lemon bar,” Arlen said.

Nobody said anything. I could hear the clock over the stove.

Ostrander turned in his chair to face me. He is not a man given to drama.

“Ma’am, may I ask you something? The slide I was shown says net thirty. This says half and half, at the check. Which is it?”

“Tom, those are updated terms,” Brad said. “We’ve refined them.”

“Not at my table, you haven’t,” said Arlen.

“It has never been net thirty,” I said, and my voice came out calm, which surprised me. “A dairy gets paid once a month, and the milk check lands on a different day for every cooperative. Ask a farmer to pay in thirty days and you break him by Christmas. That’s why the second half is due when the check lands. I worked it out with a pencil in a spiral notebook. I can show you the notebook.”

“You have the notebook?”

“I have six boxes of it,” I said. “A friend kept them out of the dumpster.”

Brad’s face did something then that I will not describe.

Kyle, by the refrigerator, said in a clear voice, “The terms on the slide are wrong, Mr. Ostrander. I should have said so sooner. It’s half and half. I have the cards.”

It was very quiet.

Ostrander sat back. He looked at the old man, and the faded page, and the sugar-dusted bars, and the woman in the sage cardigan. He looked at Brad last, and not for long.

“I think,” he said slowly, “I’d like to see the rest of the route.”

Chapter 10

I did not ride the rest of the route. It was not mine to ride.

But I heard about it for a week, from half the county.

They drove to the Hollister hog farm next. Marcy Hollister was in the yard with a bucket, and when Ostrander asked how the program worked she set the bucket down and said, “Oh, honey, you have to ask Gail Lindgren that.” She went in and came out with a metal recipe box. Inside was her ration card, in my handwriting, thirty years of pencil and ink.

At every stop the farmers said the same thing. They did not say a cruel word about Brad, because Arlen had asked them not to. They answered what they were asked.

By noon the man from Plains Valley had heard my name nine times from nine families. By two o’clock he had stopped asking.

He called Carol Haas from the road. He told her the slide was wrong in at least three places, and that the program’s value as a deal term depended on who knew how to run it. The person who knew, he said, was not on the payroll.

Carol told me later that she was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “My father used to say that bookkeeper was the only person in that building who asked the farmers questions.”

That night Dee called me at home.

“Saturday. Methodist basement. Six o’clock. Lois is making ham. Everybody is bringing something. Do not argue with me, and wear the cardigan again.”

“Dee, I just had a party.”

“That one wasn’t yours,” said Dee. “This one is.”