And under all of that was the thing I could not say out loud. Gary was my brother. Whatever he had done, I could still see him at fifteen, with grease to his elbows, letting his little sister kill the engine on the section road for the fourth time and saying, “Again.”
Kay stopped me in the parking lot at the Cenex on Saturday. Kay is Gary’s wife, a small tired woman who keeps the church nursery and has never said an unkind word about anyone. She held a gallon of milk against her chest and said, out of nowhere, “He hasn’t slept right since Easter, Bev.” She didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t ask. I looked at her and I knew she did not know what he had done. She knew only that something sat in her husband like a stone, and I stood there with my promise in my mouth and let her go home with her milk.
Standing there I understood this was not going to be a story about a villain. Gary was a man carrying something he could not set down. That did not make the money any less gone. It only meant I would have to be careful how I got it back.
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Monday I called in to the school for a personal morning. Sunday night I had baked a pan of caramel rolls, the kind with the pecans on the bottom, because they were soft and because nobody has ever walked into a room of men holding caramel rolls and been asked to explain herself. At twenty-five past six I stood outside the feed office in the half dark, with the grain trucks idling at the scale and the whole town smelling of dust and diesel, and I did a thing I had not done in forty years. I walked into the board of directors’ meeting.
There were seven of them that morning. Roy Tessmer sat nearest the door, where he always sits. Roy is seventy-nine and was a lineman for the rural electric for forty years, a big man with hands like feed scoops and a face that looks like a road map of the state. Hank Eide and Vern Stahl were across from him, and Dutch Becker was at the end with the crossword. Four of the eight chairs held a man. The one at the head of the table, with the arms, was empty. Nobody had sat in it since February. Nobody had said so. It was just a chair nobody wanted.
“Well, Bev Dunn,” Roy said, and he took the roll I handed him without looking at it. “That’s not a school morning.”
“No.”
“Where’s Walt?”
“That’s why I came.”
I stood there holding a pan of rolls in my two hands. I had practiced a speech in the car, and when I opened my mouth it fell away, and what came out was plain.
“Dad’s upper plate cracked in December. He’s been eating oatmeal since. He’s lost nineteen pounds. He won’t come to coffee because he can’t eat what you put in front of him, and he can’t stand for you to see him not eat it.” My voice did a thing, and I waited for it. “He’s too proud to say it to anybody. So I’m saying it.”