Harlan
Naomi Frost came to the table that same afternoon, after Trent had gone. She is forty-one and runs the Brandt County Courier, a weekly paper of twelve pages, and she is the reporter, the editor, the photographer, and on Thursdays the person who folds it.
“I’m not asking if you want to be in the paper, Mr. Vance,” she said. “I’m asking about the plan. Harlan Hanks’s service plan. I sat with him at Prairie Rest for two hours on Tuesday.”
Prairie Rest is the care home in Tilden. Harlan was ninety-one and his memory came and went like a radio station in a thunderstorm. I had seen him twice since the firing, and both times he had not known what year it was.
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“He doesn’t remember much,” I said.
“He remembers the closing as clearly as his own name,” Naomi said, and she opened her notebook. “He sat at a conference table in Sioux Falls with three lawyers from Corbin and Hale. He told them, ‘I have a man named Harold Vance who has thirty years in November. You pay him that pension or I don’t sign.’ And Alan Frisk, the regional vice president, said, ‘Harlan, of course. We’ll honor every dime.’ Did he tell you he wrote it down?”
“No.”
“He keeps a Folgers can on the shelf by his window. In it is a yellow legal-pad page with the date of the closing, the names of the four people at the table, and the sentence, ‘Frisk says they will honor Harold’s pension.’ He signed it. He had an aide witness it that same afternoon, a woman named Beth. I made a copy. He said, and I am quoting, ‘Tell Harold I’m sorry I wasn’t smarter.'”
I looked down at the key machine, and for a moment I could not see it.
“He didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“No. That is what I am going to write.” Then she asked, kindly, “When they walked you out, did anyone say your name was on a list?”
“Trent Mabry just told me. There is a column on a spreadsheet.”
She stopped writing. “Would he say that to me?”
“I don’t know. He has a baby coming in January.”
She closed her notebook. “Then I won’t ask him,” she said. “Not until he is ready.”
Naomi Frost could have run the story that Thursday. She had Harlan’s page, my firing, the register numbers. She waited twelve days because she wanted the whole truth, not the first truth, and I am more grateful for those twelve days than I can say.