The Coffee Can That Fixed the Roof

By the Saturday before Christmas, her running total on the lid read $2,880. She had counted it at the kitchen table three times, twice by herself and once with Ben, who counted aloud in the voice he uses for the livestock tally.

It was bright and cold that morning, the sky scrubbed pale, the kind of Missouri winter day that looks mild until the wind finds your collar. The sale was a big one, a pre-Christmas run, and the lot was packed with trailers back to the county road.

There were pickups, stock trailers, a cattle liner idling by the fence. The pens were full of black calves bawling for their mothers.

Glenda had poured since seven. By eleven she was down to forty cups in the sleeve and six cookies on the plate. The can had taken in $120 for the day, the bills crowding the lid.

That would make $3,000 even. I had done the math and not said it. A round number looks like fate, and I did not want to say the word aloud and scare it off.

Then a gray Chevy turned in off the county road, slow.

I knew it before I saw the plates. It was Wayne’s truck. It had a ding in the fender from the winter Lorraine got sick, when he’d been driving too fast to the hospital.

He parked crooked, the way he does when he is thinking about something else. The engine cut. For a minute nothing happened.

Then the door opened and he climbed down and stood with his hat in his hand, looking at the stand, the cooler, the girl at the table.

I had never seen him look so much like his brother.

The cattlemen went quiet one at a time, like a pasture when a hawk crosses it. It started near the gate and spread down the row, until the only sound was the auctioneer’s voice coming faint out of the barn.

Everyone in that lot knew who he was. A good half of them had heard him say pocket change at the feed store.

Wayne walked to the stand. I stepped one pace aside, not to get out of his way, but to stand where Glenda could reach me with her elbow.

Glenda did not say hello. She picked up the wax paper off the corner of the stand and held it out to him with both hands.

“It’s from this morning,” she said. “I made it fresh.”

He turned it over in his big hands. His hands were shaking, which I had never seen either.

“Who showed you to roll it in the cinnamon sugar, honey?” he asked.

“Aunt Lorraine, sir,” Glenda said. “I do it with my hand. Like she showed me.”

He took it. He unwrapped the paper slowly. He broke the snickerdoodle in half, and held the two pieces for a moment as though weighing them.

He ate one half standing there. He chewed it with his eyes shut.

“That’s Lorraine’s,” he said, very low.

Wayne nodded. He didn’t seem able to talk for a minute. Then he turned, not to Glenda, but to the men.

I had never heard him speak that loud. He has a quiet voice, a voice made for talking to cattle and widows.

“I want everybody to hear this.” His voice broke at the top of it and he began again. “In September I sat at my brother’s table and told this girl her church roof would make pocket change.”