What Cody Said
I drove home and I called Cody, finally, sitting in my car in my own driveway with the engine running for the heater.
He answered on the second ring and said “Hey Kenny,” the way he has since high school, like nothing in the world was wrong. Then I said, “I got a check from the barn yesterday,” and the line went quiet.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I was going to get that fixed.”
“Fixed how, Cody?”
“I was going to call the office and have them reissue it to me. I forgot the account was still in your name. I didn’t think about where it’d get mailed.”
“Those were Lyle’s cows.”
He did not say they weren’t. That is the one thing I will give him.
He did not try to tell me they were his, or that he bought them from somebody, or that I had it wrong.
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“I owe Ernie forty two hundred dollars,” he said. “For the transmission in the pickup. He did the work in September. He told me last week if he didn’t have it by the fifteenth he was keeping the truck and selling it to cover it.”
Ernie Kraus has the repair shop on the highway at the edge of town. He is a fair man and he is not a patient one.
If you have lived out here any time at all, you know both of those things about him.
“Without the pickup I can’t haul,” Cody said. “Without hauling I can’t pay anybody. Not Ernie, not the rent, not anybody.”
“So you stole five cows from the people who brought a ham to my dad’s funeral.”
He made a sound I had never heard him make, in sixteen years of knowing him. Then he said the thing he had obviously been telling himself all week.
“Lyle runs forty head on a whole section, Kendra. Old cows wander. Fences go down. I figured they’d think five got out on the county road or went through the wire into somebody’s cornstalks and got sold by mistake. It happens.”
“It doesn’t happen to Arlene,” I said. “She counted them from her front door this morning. She noticed Thursday.”
He was quiet again. Then he said, “You went over there.”
“I took her the check.”
“Kendra.” His voice cracked on it. “Why didn’t you call me first? I could have fixed it. I could have gone over there myself.”
“I called the brand inspector first,” I said. “Because it was my name. And then I went over there because they’re our neighbors, Cody. They were your neighbors too.”
I hung up. I did not yell. I have never been a yeller, and I was not going to start in a driveway on a Saturday morning over a man I was already done being married to.