The Tab on the Coffee Bench

“You’d have known, and you’d have stopped him, and he’d have let you. That’s all it is. It isn’t that you didn’t care. You couldn’t see, and the one person you trusted to be your eyes was using it.”

“Is it paid?”

“It’s paid. I paid it Wednesday.”

“Out of what?”

“Out of the roof.”

He gave a strange small laugh, wet at the edges. “That leaky corner.”

“It’ll keep.”

He did not thank me. Our family does not do that. He put his hand over mine on his knee, the big knuckled hand that has pulled ten thousand calves, and left it there until the Sanka was stone cold.

Then he said, “Cecil’s a good man. I put my name to a note for him once, and he’s paid me back twice. I want to go Saturday, like always. And when Dwight does it, I want to be sitting there.”

“Pa, you don’t have to hear that.”

“I’ve been hearing it for two years.” His mouth set. “I just didn’t know what I was hearing. I want to sit there and know.”

Saturday morning I got to my father’s house at ten past six, and he was already dressed in his good brown work jacket with his cane across his knees and a black felt marker in his shirt pocket.

I asked what the marker was for.

“I’ll show you when it’s time,” he said.

Dwight pulled up at seven in the Silverado. He did not come in. He honked the horn twice, the way he always does, and my father stood, and I walked him out to the porch step so my brother would see me.

Dwight rolled the window down. He is fifty-five and has our mother’s coloring and our father’s shoulders, and when he is happy there is nobody in the county easier to like. He has a laugh you can hear across a pasture. That is the difficulty. It is always the difficulty.

“Well, look who it is,” he said. “The city girl. What’s the occasion?”

“Thought I’d sit with Pa a while.”

“Didn’t know you ever did Saturdays.”

“I’m doing one today.”

He studied me for the length of a heartbeat, and I will say this for my brother: he is not stupid. Something crossed his face and was gone. Then he grinned and leaned over to push the passenger door open, and my father climbed in, and I followed in my own car.

When I walked into Brandt’s, Cecil was behind the counter and Marcy was at the register, and neither of them looked at me.

Dwight settled Pa at the end of the pew with his coffee, patted him on the shoulder, and walked off toward the back for a bag of dog food and a box of galvanized staples. I took the place beside my father and set my purse on my knees.

That was when Harlan Voss said, “Well, Imogene.”

Ernie Kessler, who is seventy-nine and owns the quarter next to ours, stared into his cup like it had written him a letter. Tom Beal shifted on the pew. Gus Schroeder, who cannot hold a thought without saying it, opened his mouth and shut it again.

They knew. Maybe not the number, but the shape of it. I could tell by how the whole bench held still.

Dwight came up the aisle with his arms full, humming. He set the dog food on the counter and the staples on top of it, looked back at the bench, found our father, and gave him a little wave nobody on earth could have seen. Then he turned around.