The Teeth Dad Waited a Year For

“Pop’s being kind,” Gary said. He was talking to the table, but his eyes were on my father. “It isn’t what happened. He didn’t hand me anything. I moved it on the twenty-first of January, and then I called Tom’s office and told them Pop had changed his mind, which he hadn’t. I took it. Kay doesn’t know I took it.”

Nobody breathed.

“The bank cut my line in January. The seed and chemical bill came due April first, thirty-one thousand dollars, and Lyle couldn’t carry me, because nobody carries anybody anymore.” He glanced at Lyle, and Lyle did not look away. “I was four thousand one hundred fifty short. It was sitting right there. I told myself I’d put it back when the beans went to town, and then the beans came in at nine-forty and the note was due and Tyler’s truck payment and the fuel. And every Sunday I sat at Pop’s table and watched him cut up a pork chop like a baby’s and I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t ask for it. I couldn’t tell him. Then Thursday Lyle said, ‘Hope Walt likes the new teeth,’ and I stood on that scale with a load of beans and found out the whole table had paid for what I took.”

“You could have asked,” my father said quietly.

“You’d have said yes.”

“I would have.”

“That’s why I couldn’t,” said my brother, and his voice went out from under him.

Then he came across the room, around the end of the table where Dutch sat holding his crossword in both hands, and he laid the envelope in front of my father’s plate. “Lyle cut me the settlement on Friday’s load, and I endorsed it in the truck. That’s four thousand one hundred fifty dollars. That’s all of it, Pop. It isn’t interest. I don’t know what interest is on a thing like this.”

The room was so quiet I could hear the Mr. Coffee tick.

My father looked at the envelope. He looked at it a long time. Then he looked up at his son, and he did a thing I had not expected, though I should have. He picked up the caramel roll and held it out across the table.

“Eat,” he said. “They’re soft.”

Gary stared at it. I saw the muscles in his throat go. Then he took it, and he stood there holding a caramel roll in the middle of a feed office at half past six in the morning with his face coming apart, and my father reached over and pulled out the chair next to his own.

“Sit down, son.”

“I haven’t earned that chair.”

“Nobody earns that chair,” Roy said, from across the table. He was already pouring a cup. “It’s just the one that’s open.”

Gary sat. And the board of directors, bless every one of them, went right back to talking about the price of beans. Hank said nine-forty was a crime. Vern said it was the Chinese. Dutch said it was the weather in Brazil, and Roy said Dutch had said that last year and been wrong. Under cover of all that noise my brother put his face in his hand, and my father laid his own hand flat between Gary’s shoulder blades, the way he used to when we were small and had fallen off something, and left it there.

I stood against the wall by the door, where I had stood for the whole of it, and I did not say a word, because I had promised, and because there was nothing left that needed saying by me.