The Apron I Took to My Brother

The second day

Saturday was the second day of the sale. Saturday morning is when the serious buyers come in Arkansas, the ones who have been driving the back roads since six with a list.

I got back to Mom’s by eight. Dixie had already set the tables out again with what was left: linens, Christmas boxes, a crate of mason jars, and the rest of the kitchen.

I told her about Webb in the driveway while we unloaded. I told her about the plant and the vise and the pencil marks.

She stood there holding a stack of Mom’s tea towels and listened to the whole thing without interrupting once.

“Does your mom know about the layoff,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

“She knows,” Dixie said. “Mothers know. She just wanted you two to find it out on your own.”

I went inside to check on Mom. She was in the bedroom packing the last of her clothes into a suitcase. I told her I had been to Webb’s and taken him the apron.

She did not ask what happened. She just nodded and said, “Good,” and went on folding a blouse. But her hands were shaking a little, and she had to fold it twice.

By eleven the yard was full again. It was a bright, clear morning, the kind of October day when the whole county comes outside.

Mrs. Dobbs was back, and both fire department men, and a dozen faces from the day before who had come to see what was left.

At about a quarter to two, I heard a truck on the gravel. I looked up from the cash table and saw Webb’s truck coming up the road, slow. He parked on the shoulder this time, not in the yard.

He got out. He had the apron on.

I felt the yard notice him. People do not forget a thing like that from one day to the next, not in a county this size.

Conversations got quieter. One of the fire department men put down a box of mason jars.

Webb walked straight past the tables and up to the porch, where Mom was sitting in the one lawn chair we had not sold. He stopped at the bottom of the steps.

He took a fold of bills out of the apron’s front pocket. He walked up the three steps, and he put the money in her hand, and he closed her fingers around it with his.

“That’s six hundred fifty, Mama,” he said. “For Dad’s tools.”

Then he turned around on the top step and faced the yard.

He did not have to. Nobody would have made him. But he looked out at those thirty-odd people, his neighbors and Dad’s customers and the men he went to school with, and he said it in a voice they could all hear.

“I took my daddy’s tools yesterday without paying for them. I took them off my mama’s table in front of all of you. I was wrong to do it, and I’m sorry you had to see it.”

Nobody said a word. Then Mrs. Dobbs, who is eighty if she is a day, said, “Well, Webb Sutton, I’ve known you since you were in diapers, and I never thought you were a thief, and I don’t now.”

Somebody laughed, the good kind. One of the fire department men said, “Your daddy fixed my saw for free the winter my wife was sick.” And just like that the yard went back to being a yard.

Mom did not say anything at all. She sat in the lawn chair holding the money in one hand and reached up with the other and took hold of the bib of that apron and held on to it.

Webb stood there and let her. He stood there a long time.