The reason
I sat down on the tailgate next to him, with the coffee between us. For a while neither of us said anything. A rooster was going somewhere down the road.
“I got laid off in August,” he said.
I turned and looked at him.
“They shut down the second line at the plant. Forty of us. Nineteen years and they gave me two weeks and a fruit basket. Dolly knows. Kaitlyn knows. Nobody else.”
Kaitlyn is his daughter. She is twenty and in her second year at Arkansas State in Jonesboro, studying to be a nurse.
“When you called in September,” he said, “I didn’t have a dime to spare. Kaitlyn’s tuition was due. Dolly’s paycheck covers the house and that’s about it. I wasn’t going to tell you I couldn’t afford Dad’s tools.”
“So I said sell it. I said I didn’t care. I thought if I said it enough I’d believe it.”
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He turned the apron over in his lap again.
“I came over yesterday to ask you to hold the bench lot for me. I was going to ask if I could pay you fifty a month. I had it all worked out in the truck. I even had a speech.”
“I pulled up, and that man from the fire department was standing at the table cranking Dad’s vise open and shut. And he said to his buddy, ‘This’ll bring forty at the flea market.'”
“Forty dollars,” Webb said. “Dad’s vise. I learned to file a chain in that vise.”
He had to stop. He held the apron up close to his face for a second, and then he lowered it.
“I don’t know what happened to me, Brandon. I just started loading. I couldn’t watch a stranger carry it off down the road to sell it on a card table in Mountain Home. And then you said it was spoken for, and I said that thing about my tab, and I heard myself say it, and I couldn’t take it back.”
“And then that little boy,” he said. “That little boy asked if I was stealing. And I was. In front of Mom.”
He did not cry exactly. Webb has never been a crier. He just sat there with his jaw working and his thumb going back and forth over that pocket.
I want to say I said something wise. I did not. What I said was, “You should have told me about the plant.”
“I know it.”
“I’d have held the lot for you. I’d have given it to you.”
“I know that too,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t ask.”
I understood that, the way you understand things about your brother that you could never explain to anybody else. He was the oldest. He was Dad’s helper. He was not going to be the one who needed help.