The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

Nobody spoke. Dutch laid his pen down on the crossword. I did not mention a price, and I did not mention a brother, and I did not ask for one thing. I put the pan on the table and I turned to go.

Roy Tessmer took off his cap.

It was a Pioneer cap, red gone to the color of a brick, with a sweat stain across the front as old as my marriage. He held it a moment in both hands. Then he reached in his back pocket, took out his wallet, and laid five bills in the crown of it. I saw the corners. They were hundreds.

“Roy, no,” I said. “I’m not asking for money.”

“I know you’re not, honey. That’s how I know it’s right.” He passed the cap to Hank. “Let me tell you something about your father.”

He told it to the table, not to me, though he kept his eyes on mine.

“Winter of ‘eighty-five, my dad owed this elevator eleven thousand four hundred dollars. Hogs were nothing, corn was nothing, the bank had called the note. We were going to lose the place. Your father went out to the farm in his own pickup on a Sunday, and he sat at my mother’s table and said, ‘Gene, the board doesn’t have to know how the books look.’ Three years he carried my dad. Thirty-eight families, Bev, he carried thirty-eight families on a ledger he kept in his own desk, and when the board found out in ‘eighty-six and told him to call every one of those accounts or find another job, he looked right at ’em and said, ‘Then find another manager.'”

Hank had stopped with the cap in his hands. He was crying a little and not hiding it.

“They didn’t fire him. They couldn’t. They’d have lost every one of us. And not one of us lost the farm to this elevator.” Roy put his big hand flat on the table. “This ain’t charity. This is a note come due. Every man in this room is sitting in this room because your father kept a book nobody was supposed to see.”

Hank put in a check. Vern put in four twenties and said he was sorry it wasn’t more, and Dutch said, “Vern, shut up,” and put in two hundred. They passed the cap around the round oak table the way they pass the collection plate at Trinity on the first Sunday. When it came back to Roy it was heavy and the table was quiet.

Then the door to the office opened, and Lyle Moen came out with his reading glasses on. Lyle is thirty-eight and the manager now. He is a decent man who inherited my father’s chair and a board that does not allow credit past sixty days. He did not say a word. He took a hundred out of his shirt pocket, folded it once, and dropped it in the cap.

“I can’t carry anybody anymore, Bev,” he said quietly. “The board won’t let me. But I can do this.”

I counted it twice in my car in the parking lot with the heat on, because my hands didn’t work right the first time. Two thousand seven hundred and ten dollars. In a seed cap. I sat there until a grain truck honked at me to move.