Five Cows and One Plate of Pie

“Last Wednesday five of our cows went through that ring,” Arlene said. “Some of you were here. Lyle and I didn’t sell them. Somebody else did. And the check got mailed to this girl’s house, with her name on it, because of an old account she forgot she ever had.”

She let that sit a second.

“Saturday morning at half past seven, she drove that check two miles to my front porch and put it in my hand,” Arlene said. “Before Lyle even knew we were short. She’d already called Dale the night before. She drove our money to our door.”

Then she put her hand over mine on the counter. Her hand was warm now, from the coffee cup, and it was heavy and steady and old, and she just left it there.

“Forty years I’ve lived out here,” she said. “I have never once had anybody bring me my own money back before I knew it was missing. So I’d like a piece of pie with Kendra. And anybody who wants to talk about her can come say it to me.”

Nobody said anything. In the third booth the woman with the grocery cart was looking hard at her plate.

At the end of the counter, one of the haulers next to Cody slid his cup a few inches away from him without a word.

I could not have said anything if I had tried. I sat there with Arlene’s hand over mine and I stared at the coffee and I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled, because I was not going to cry at the sale barn cafe in front of half the county.

Lyle

The glass door rang again, and it was Lyle, in his insulated coveralls and his feed store cap, with straw still on his shoulders.

He had been out back helping sort calves for a neighbor. He must have seen Arlene’s car in the lot.

He stopped beside Arlene and laid one big hand on her shoulder and nodded to me. “Kendra.” That was all. From Lyle, that is a speech.

Then he walked down to the end of the counter, not fast, and stopped by Cody’s stool.

The two men on either side of Cody found reasons to look at their phones. The whole cafe could hear, and Lyle did not seem to care one way or the other.

“Cody,” he said.

Cody got up off the stool. I will give him that too.

He stood up and took his cap off and held it in both hands, and he looked Lyle in the face, which I do not think I could have done in his place.

“Lyle, I’m sorry,” he said. “I owed Ernie for the pickup. I panicked. I told myself you’d think they got out. That’s the truth, and it’s not any kind of excuse.”

“No,” Lyle said. “It isn’t.”

He stood there a while. Lyle is not a fast thinker, people say, but I have known him a long time and I think he is just a careful one.

He thinks the whole thing through before he says the first word of it.

“Dale says I can press charges,” Lyle said. “Livestock theft. He’s got your signature on the paper. That’s a felony in this state, and you’d lose more than a pickup.”