Rodney didn’t come in. He stood on our porch with his seed cap in his hands and his pickup still running in the drive, like a man who had decided ahead of time that this was going to be short.
“The board met last night,” he said. “We moved the supper money into the truck fund, Cass. All of it. I wanted you to hear it from me and not from somebody at the cafe.”
I was holding a laundry basket full of Bryce’s T-shirts, the ones I had cut up both sides so they would go on over his dressings without dragging across his chest.
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I set the basket down on the porch swing. I remember setting it down carefully.
“The thirty-one hundred,” I said. It was not a question. I knew that number the way you know your own phone number.
Three thousand one hundred dollars, counted twice on a folding table by the fire chief and the Methodist pastor’s wife.
“The brush truck failed its pump test the week after your fire,” Rodney said.
“The pump won’t hold pressure. If we go into summer with that truck down, our fire rating can slip, and every house in town pays more for insurance. You know that’s real, Cass. You know what a grass fire does out here.”
I did know. Everybody in Chase County knows what a grass fire does in March.
That was the whole reason my son was lying upstairs in his bed with both arms wrapped from wrist to elbow and a square of gauze taped over his chest.
“Bryce has insurance,” Rodney said. “Josh’s plan through the feedlot. That truck doesn’t have anything. I had to make a call, and I made it.”
“Did Earl vote for this?”
He looked down at his cap. “Earl was out on that Morris County fire Thursday night. It was me and Darlene. The checks were written to the association. The flyer said benefit supper, it never said where the money had to go. I read the bylaws twice before I did it.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said.
That was all I said. I picked my basket back up and went inside and shut the door, not hard, just shut it, and I stood in my kitchen and listened to his truck back down the drive and turn onto the county road toward town.
Then I went upstairs and sat on the edge of Bryce’s bed and asked him if he wanted grilled cheese or tomato soup for supper, and he said both, and I said that sounded about right.