Mark
It was right around then, a little after seven, that I looked out the frosty window and saw my uncle’s truck slow down on the highway.
The lot was full. Trucks were parked on both shoulders a hundred yards each way, some of them with orange-coated men still sitting in the cabs drinking their coffee. There wasn’t a spot left anywhere near the shop.
Mark drove past once, slowly. I watched him turn around in the Hovland field road and come back, and drive past again. Then he pulled onto the far shoulder all the way down by the curve and got out and walked.
I watched him come up the side of the highway in the gray daylight, a man of fifty-eight in a good wool coat and loafers that were never meant for frozen gravel, and stop beside his own sign.
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He stood there a long time. Then he came to the door.
The line was all the way out the door by then, out onto the step, and he had to stand in it. The men on the step knew him. Everybody knew him. Some of them had bought their houses through his office.
They didn’t say anything mean to him. That’s the part that got me. They just nodded. “Mark.” “Morning, Mark.” One of them held the door.
He came in slowly, past the minnow tanks and the racks of tackle, and stopped in the middle of the room and looked at the empty shelves where the hand warmers had been, and the empty shelf where the orange caps had been, and then at his son behind the register with a price tag hanging off his hat.
Jake looked up at him. He didn’t stop ringing.
“Hi, Dad,” he said. “Coffee’s a dollar.”
Mark opened his mouth, and before he could say anything, Herb the mill man turned around from the counter with my phone in his big hand and held it out to him.
“It’s your dad,” Herb said. “He’s been listening.”
Mark looked at the phone. For a second I didn’t think he would take it. Then he did.
He held it to his ear and turned toward the frosted window so nobody could see his face. I don’t know everything Grandpa said to him. I only heard Mark’s side, and that was mostly quiet.
“Yeah, Dad,” he said. “Yeah. I see it.”
And after a while: “No. I didn’t know.”
And then, very quietly, so that only the people nearest heard it: “I know you do, Dad. I know.”
He gave the phone back to Herb without turning around, and he walked straight through the swinging half door behind the counter, past the empty stool, and out the back toward the house.