The Apron I Took to My Brother

The price

I am not a tool man. I want to say that plainly. I can change my own oil and I can hang a door if somebody holds it, but the inside of a chainsaw is a mystery to me.

So I did what Dad would have told me to do. I asked somebody who knew. I called a man named Mr. Hughes in Mountain Home who buys tool lots for flea markets and estate sales in north Arkansas. A man at the fire department gave me his number.

He drove down on a Tuesday evening and walked through the shop with a flashlight. He lifted the vise, ran his hand over the socket sets, opened the drawers of the rolling cabinet and closed them again.

“Your daddy took care of his things,” he said. “I’ll give you six hundred fifty for the whole bench lot. That’s hand tools, the vise, the gauges, the cabinet. I’ll pick it up Friday at noon so you can have the morning crowd for the rest.”

Six hundred fifty dollars. Exactly the deposit. I took it as a sign, and I shook his hand.

That Thursday, Rollo and I and the boy from next door pulled Dad’s workbench off the shop wall.

It had been bolted there since before I was born, a long oak top on four thick legs, black with forty years of grease and stained with every color of paint Dad ever touched.

The new owners did not want it. Mr. Hughes did not want it.

So we broke it down and stacked the boards and the legs at the end of the tool table with a piece of cardboard on top that said free lumber.

I went through the shop one last time that night with a box for the trash and a box for Mom.

Mom’s box got a coffee mug from the feed store with a chip in the lip, a radio that only got one station, and a calendar from 1998 that Dad never took down.

I never thought to look for the apron. It had always hung on a nail by the shop door, and when I passed that nail that night it was empty.

I assumed it had gone in a trash bag somewhere along the way. It had not.

After

The rest of that Friday went the way yard sales go. I sold Mom’s sewing machine to a girl from the junior college for thirty dollars.

I sold Dad’s fishing poles in a bundle to the fire department men for forty.

At ten I called Mr. Hughes and told him the tool lot was gone. There was a long silence on the line.

“Gone where,” he said.

“My brother took it.”

“Your brother bought it out from under me?”

“No, sir,” I said. “He just took it. I’m sorry for your drive.”

He said a few things about my family that I am not going to repeat, and then he hung up. I did not blame him. He had held that Friday for us, and he had been fair.

Around eleven, I went inside to use the bathroom, and Mom was sitting in the front room in Dad’s recliner, which was sold and tagged and waiting for a man from Sulphur Rock to pick it up. She was looking out the window at the yard.

“Don’t you chase him,” she said, before I even opened my mouth.

“Mom, that was your deposit.”

“I know what it was. Leave him be today, Brandon. You go sell those people my dishes.”

So I went back out and sold her dishes. I sold the Christmas village and the porch swing and the green glass candy dish she had kept on top of the television since 1979.

Every time somebody handed me money, I thought about the six hundred and fifty dollars sitting in the bed of Webb’s truck.

I had already done the math. Dixie and I could cover the deposit out of our own savings if we had to. We had a little put back.

But that was not the point, and I think anybody who has a brother knows it was not the point.

The point was the way he did it. In front of thirty people. In front of her. Put it on my tab.