Nine Saturdays at the Sale Barn

“If it sits in your kitchen, it’ll go to a water pump,” he had told us. “It always does. Leave it with me. I won’t touch it, and you can’t.”

He was right about the water pump. That same winter our well pump went out and it cost us nine hundred dollars. If the trip money had been in our cupboard, it would have gone down that well.

So the coffee can sat on the top shelf of Gene’s pantry, behind the Folgers he actually drank, for three years. Every time we added to it, Hailey wrote the date and the amount on a strip of masking tape on the lid. By August the tape went all the way around.

And now the can was empty, and my father-in-law was rocking on his swing telling me she would have to wait a year.

“Gene,” I said, “she’s a senior. There isn’t a next year.”

He did not have an answer for that. He looked at his boots.

Randy came up the steps then. My husband is a big, quiet man, the kind who fixes a fence before he talks about why it broke. He sat down on the porch rail across from his father.

“Who’s in the lease?” he asked.

“Lyman. The Ochs boys. Ted Friesen.” Gene said the names like they explained everything, and in a way they did. Those were the men he had hunted with since he was in his twenties. Two of them had lost their wives the same year he lost my mother-in-law.

“They asked me in June,” Gene said. “Said it might be our last good season together. Lyman’s heart isn’t what it was. I signed my name on it with the rest of them, and then the payment came due, and I didn’t have it.”

“So you could have told them,” Randy said.

“I’d already signed.” His voice got rough. “A man doesn’t back out on his friends.”

I want to be fair to him. I knew what that lease meant. My mother-in-law, June, had been gone four years, and that porch got lonelier every season. Those old men were all he had left of the man he used to be.

But that did not make it his money.

I set the cobbler on the little table by his swing. I said, “I’m going to go tell her. I’m not going to lie to her about it.”

“Shawna,” he said. “Don’t make me the bad guy to that girl.”

“I’m not going to make you anything,” I said. “I’m just going to tell her what happened.”

People ask that too. Why I didn’t call the sheriff, or tell Randy to take his father to court, or call the hunting buddies myself and embarrass him into getting it back.

The answer is simple. He was Randy’s father. He was the man who held Hailey in the hospital the day she was born and cried harder than anybody. And he did mean to pay it back. You don’t call the sheriff on a man like that. You find another way.

I walked down to the car. Hailey looked up and saw my face and put her phone away. She is that kind of girl. She has always been able to read a room faster than I can.