“You want to borrow my lot on a Saturday,” he said.
“And your two lifts, if Cody can spare the morning. No charge to anybody. A free look at the brakes, the filters, the fluids, and a free look at whatever invoice they’re holding.”
He stood up and dusted his knees. “Pheasant opener is the eighteenth. Half the county will be in a field by sunup. The other half can come here.”
“I’ll tell them Wednesday,” I said.
“I’ll call Duane Kolb,” Ted said. “He turned wrenches at the Co-op for forty years.”
On Wednesday, I stood up at the Rock Falls Legion Hall.
The senior meal there runs every Wednesday at noon in the basement under the flag, five dollars for hot dish and bars, and Judy Dvorak has run it for eleven years with an iron spoon and an iron memory. Forty-three of us were there that day. I counted, the way you count anything when your hands are shaking.
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When Judy finished the announcements about the cemetery mowing and the bake sale, I stood up with my coffee.
“I’d like two minutes, if nobody minds,” I said.
Judy looked at me over her glasses, and nodded once.
“Last August I paid eighteen hundred and sixty dollars for new brakes on Vern’s truck,” I said. “In October I found out they were never put on. The old ones were still there, and so was Vern’s paint on the bolts.”
Nobody moved. A spoon clinked against a plate somewhere in the back.
“I’m not saying anything about anyone,” I went on. “I’m only telling you what I found. Cody Gunderson at Hurley Service in Wessel will look at brakes, filters, and fluids for nothing on Saturday the eighteenth, starting at eight. Duane Kolb will be there too. Bring your invoices, and bring your vehicles.”
“Marlene,” said Harvey Zeller, from the third table, in his slow farmer’s voice. “Who did the work?”
“Your invoice will say, Harvey,” I said.
I sat down. I did not say a name, and I did not need to. Half the room had gone as pale as the potatoes.
Then Gene Aaker leaned across the table and said to Alvin Peterka, quiet as a deacon, “Alvin, what did you pay for that transmission fluid job?”
“Two eighty-nine,” Alvin said. “Why?”
“Because I’d like to know what’s in my own pickup,” said Gene.
Harvey was the first one out the door. When I walked outside twenty minutes later with Judy, he was lying on his back in the gravel beside his old Dodge with a flashlight from Judy’s kitchen, and two other men were standing over him with their hands in their back pockets.
He slid out slowly, with dust in his hair, and sat up against the tire.
“Roy charged me for a new fuel filter in June,” he said. His voice was flat. “This one’s got a Co-op sticker on it. I put that sticker on in 2021.”
Nobody said anything. Then Alvin Peterka took off his cap and put it back on again, which is what a man like Alvin does instead of swearing.
Forty-three people had come for hot dish, and by the end of that afternoon half of them were turning out their glove boxes in the lot, looking for invoices.
By Friday night, the telephone had rung nine times, and every call was somebody else holding an invoice. Marge Pfeifer cried. The pastor, Dan Reinke, called to ask whether the church van’s tie rods had ever really been replaced, at six hundred and twenty dollars, and I told him I did not know, but I knew a boy who could tell him.