What Oren said
He stood at the end of the table with his hand on Delia’s card. He did not have a speech. He was not that kind of man. He just said it plain, the way he used to read work orders at the plant.
“I got cataracts,” he said. “Both eyes. The doctor in Winter Haven told me in March. Said the left one’s bad and the right one’s getting there. I didn’t go back.”
He looked down the table at Eric.
“I didn’t tell my son,” he said. “I knew what he’d do, and he’d have been right to do it. I didn’t want to lose the rig. It’s the last thing his mother and I bought together.
“I figured if I was careful, and I drove in the daytime, I’d get one more winter out of it.”
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He turned and looked at the row of people, at Quinn and Francine and Reggie and all of them.
“In Arcadia, the sun was right off those white trailers,” he said. “I never saw her camper. I didn’t see it till I heard it. And then I sat in my truck and told every one of you she parked wrong, because I didn’t want you to know I couldn’t see.
“She didn’t park wrong. She was eleven inches inside her line. Quinn measured it again after she went in. He told me that night, and I still didn’t say anything.”
I looked at Quinn. Quinn was looking at his coffee.
“She paid five thousand dollars out of her own pocket so nobody would call me and ask me how I missed it,” Oren said. “And then she got up in the dark and made Eileen’s pancakes for me.”
He stopped. He had to. He stood there with his hand on that poster board and his chin down, and the fog moved behind him on the lake, and nobody said a word.
Then he said, “I’m sorry, Cassie. In front of all the same folks I said it to. I’m sorry.”
“I know, Oren,” I said. “Sit down and eat before they get cold.”