The bench leg
After a while Webb got up and climbed into the bed of his truck. He moved two boxes aside and pulled out one of the bench legs, a thick old four by four as black as a railroad tie.
“You didn’t see this,” he said. “Did you.”
He turned it so the inside face was toward me, the side that had been against the shop wall for forty years, and he held it out.
There were pencil marks on it. Little lines, one above the other, climbing up the wood. Next to every line there was a letter W and a number, in Dad’s square carpenter’s handwriting.
W 5. W 6. W 7. All the way up to W 14, where the marks stopped about a foot from the top.
“Every year on my birthday,” Webb said. “He’d stand me against the leg and mark it with his carpenter’s pencil. Said when I got taller than the bench I’d be ready to run the shop.”
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“I passed it at fourteen. He took me to the Dairy Queen in Batesville and bought me a banana split, and he never marked it again.”
I sat on that tailgate and looked at those marks, and I could not say anything at all. I had walked past that bench ten thousand times.
I had helped rip it off the wall two days before. I had stacked that leg under a piece of cardboard that said free lumber.
“I didn’t know,” I said finally. “Webb, I swear to you I did not know.”
“I know you didn’t,” he said. “You were at ballgames.”
He said it plain, not mean. Mom’s exact words. I guess she had said them to him once too, a long time ago.
The coffee
We drank the coffee. It had gone lukewarm, and Webb drank his anyway, the way Dad used to drink his on a cold morning in the shop with the space heater ticking.
Then Webb did something I did not expect. He untied the apron, put it over his head, and wrapped the long ties around twice and knotted them in front, the way Dad did.
It fit him. Webb is built the way Dad was built, broad through the shoulders and short through the legs.
Standing there in his driveway with that apron on, he looked so much like our father that I had to look at the gravel for a minute.
“What do I owe you,” he said.
“Webb.”
“No. What do I owe Mom. Six fifty?”
“Mr. Hughes was paying six fifty,” I said. “But that’s Mom’s deposit, and Dixie and I can cover it. We already talked about it last night.”
“No,” he said. “You’re not covering my mess. I’ll have it to you by this afternoon.”
“You just told me you don’t have a dime.”
He nodded toward the carport. Under it sat his four-wheeler, a red Honda Rancher he had bought used about five years back for deer season.
“Mr. Pruitt down the road has been after me to sell him that thing since August,” he said. “I kept saying no. I’ll call him this morning.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes,” Webb said. “I do.”