The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

Jolene came out of the drugstore in Wheeler without the cough drops she went in for. She climbed up into the truck, shut the door against the wind, and sat there with her purse in her lap.

I had the heater running and the radio on the cattle report. I turned it down. Thirty years married teaches you when a woman is about to say something she does not want to say.

“Ward was in there,” she said. “At the pharmacy counter. He was counting out quarters for his knee pills, Garnet. Quarters. And he came up short.”

I looked through the windshield at the front of the drugstore. Ward’s old blue Ford was parked two spaces down, the one with the cracked tailgate and the Army sticker half peeled off the back glass.

“Short how much?”

“Eleven dollars.” She pressed her lips together. “The girl at the counter said she could hold them till Monday. He said that was fine. He said it like it was nothing, like he was asking her about the weather.”

“Did you pay it?”

“I tried. He would not let me. He said, ‘Jolene, I’m fine, I get paid Friday.’ And then he walked out the side door so he would not have to walk past me.”

She was quiet a while. The wind rocked the truck on its springs, the way it does in the Panhandle in February, steady and mean and never in any hurry to quit.

“He doesn’t get paid Friday,” she said finally. “Does he.”

I did not answer, because I did not know yet. But I had a feeling in my stomach, and the feeling had my brother-in-law’s name on it.

Ward

Ward Fenley is my cousin on my mother’s side. He is seventeen years younger than me, so when he was a boy I was already grown and working cattle, and he used to follow me around the pens like a heeler pup.

He joined the Army out of high school. He did two tours in Afghanistan, and on the second one a vehicle he was riding in went into a ditch on a mountain road and rolled. He walked away from it. His knee did not.

They fixed what they could. He has a scar from his thigh to his shin and a knee that will not bend past about halfway. He walks with a cane on bad days, and in a Texas Panhandle winter most days are bad days.

He does not talk about any of it. He does not complain about the knee, or the VA, or the cold, or anything else. If you ask him how he is doing, he says, “Fair to middling,” and asks about your cows.

When he came home he tried a few things. He worked at a tire shop in Shamrock until the standing got to be too much. He drove a feed truck for a while. Then last summer he told me he wanted to get back horseback.

“I can’t walk worth a flip,” he said, “but I can still ride. A horse doesn’t care about my knee.”