The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

The rest of the morning

The coffee regulars went back to their pot, slowly. Nobody made a speech.

Rudy said, “Well,” the way Rudy says “well” about a hailstorm or a funeral or a good corn crop, and sat back down.

Edna paid for her sunflower seed at the register, which Brody ran himself, and on her way past me she patted my arm twice and did not say anything at all.

Lavern refilled his mug.

One of the Hoffman brothers went out to his truck and came back with a box of doughnuts from the bakery on the square and set it open on the counter, and that was all anybody needed to say about it.

I stayed. I did not know what else to do with myself. I walked the nail aisle and looked at things I did not need.

I bought a box of three-inch deck screws I already had at home.

Brody came out to the aisle while I was standing there. “Garner,” he said. I waited. “She’s going to hear about this by noon,” he said. “Somebody’s going to call her.”

I told him I knew. “I’m going to tell her myself,” he said. “Before anybody else does. I’m going to drive home at lunch and tell her the whole thing.”

I looked at him. And for the first time since Friday, I saw my son-in-law again, instead of the man who docked my father.

“That’s the right thing,” I said. He said he should have done the right thing three weeks ago. “Yes,” I said. “You should have.”

He nodded. He did not argue with that either.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “Kade’s been going down there every Sunday since August. To his mom’s. I didn’t know he was paying for the gas himself. He never said. I thought she was giving him money.” He rubbed his beard. “I should have asked.”

“He’s a good kid, Brody,” I said, and he said he knew it.

He looked toward the key machine, where his son was bent over the vise with my father’s hand on his shoulder. “I think I forgot that for about three weeks.”

The key

Around half past eleven, the store slowed down.

It does that on Saturdays, the half hour before close, when the farmers have all come and gone and the town people have not started their afternoon projects yet.

I went back up to the counter. Kade had gone to the stockroom to break down boxes.

Dad was alone at the key machine, brushing brass shavings off the plate with the little paintbrush he keeps for it.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I know I said I’d let it go.” He did not look up.

“You did let it go. You let two hundred and twelve dollars go, right onto the counter.”

I told him he knew what I meant. “I know what you mean,” he said. He set the brush down. “Your mother would have done the same thing. Only she’d have done it louder.”

I laughed. I had not laughed since Friday afternoon. It came out of me like a cough.

Dad reached up to the pegboard behind the machine, where the key blanks hang on their hooks in rows, sorted by type.

He ran his finger along them the way he always has, like a man reading a shelf of books, and he took one down. A plain brass house blank.

I asked what that was for. He told me to give him my house key. I said I already had a spare, and he said, “Give it here.”

I worked my house key off my ring and handed it to him.

He clamped it in one side of the machine and the blank in the other, and he lined them up with his thumb, slow and careful, the same way he has done it ten thousand times. Then he switched on the cutter.

The sound of it filled the front of the store. That high thin whine, and the smell of hot brass.

I had not stood at that counter and watched him cut a key for me in forty-five years.

He ran it through. He took it out and brushed it off and held it up to the window light and looked down the edge of it with one eye shut.

Then he handed me both keys. Mine and the new one. “There,” he said. I asked him what it was for. “Nothing,” he said. “No reason.”

I stood there holding a brand-new brass key in the palm of my hand, in the morning light from the front windows, and I could not say anything at all for a minute.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He always did. I put the new key on my ring, next to the old one.

It is still there. I have never once used it to open anything. That is not what it is for.