The Tab on the Coffee Bench

“Why didn’t you call me then?”

“Because I didn’t know who to call.” He said it plain. “How does a man ask your father, who can’t read a piece of paper, to look at a piece of paper? And I didn’t want to call the sheriff on Dwight Pruitt in a town this size. I thought, give it till harvest. Then I counted it up Sunday night. I’m selling this store in the spring, my nephew’s taking it over, and I can’t hand a boy a book with that in it. And I thought of the note. And I couldn’t sleep.”

Marcy Dunn knocked once and put her head in the door. She is fifty-three and has worked the front register at Brandt’s for twenty-two years.

“I should’ve said something sooner,” she said. “He taps the counter, Imogene. Like it’s funny. And your daddy’s sitting twenty feet away on that bench with his coffee, and he can’t see any of it.”

That was the sentence that did it. Not the tires. Not the beer. Twenty feet away, with his coffee.

I did not call the sheriff, and I did not call a lawyer, and I did not drive to Dwight’s doublewide and put my fist through his storm door, though I thought about that for most of the drive home.

The deputy in our county is a boy my brother coached in Little League. The county attorney was in Dwight’s graduating class. In a town of nine hundred, a charge like that prints “Arlen Pruitt’s son” in the Aldrich Weekly Courier beside the word “theft,” and my father, who had never been in that paper for anything but a wheat yield and a funeral, would have to sit in a courtroom and be handed a document he could not read.

I would not do that to him. And I could not do the other thing either, the one everybody says you should do, which is go straight to the one who did it with the proof in your fist. I knew exactly what Dwight would say. He would say, “Pa never minded.” And I knew something worse, which was that my brother might actually believe it.

So I drove home to Salina and sat at my own kitchen table with my own checkbook and a pot of decaf going cold, and I did the thing I know how to do. I added.

Lyle came in from the garage at four. My husband is sixty-two, retired from the electric company after thirty-four years of climbing poles, and he has a way of standing in a doorway and letting me get there on my own. I told him all of it.

“How much is in the roof money?” he asked.

“Fourteen thousand and some.”

“Then it’s eleven eight out of the roof money, and the new roof waits another year. The old one has leaked on the same corner of the spare room since 2019. It can leak a while longer.”

“It’s not our debt.”

“No. It’s his, and it’s your father’s, and neither of them is going to carry it. You are. You’ll do it whether I say yes or not, so I’m saying yes before you have to ask.”

I got up and held on to the back of his shirt a moment, and neither of us said anything.