The Coffee Can That Fixed the Roof

Nobody breathed.

“I said it to be smart. I said it to a nine-year-old. It was the meanest thing I’ve said in my life, and I’ve said some.” He looked at Glenda. “I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Glenda stared at him. I will carry the look on her face to my grave. It was not triumph. It was a child’s astonishment that a grown man would say it out loud.

“Okay,” she said.

“That’s all?” Wayne asked.

“I don’t know what else you want me to say, Uncle Wayne. I said okay.”

Somebody in the back laughed, a short surprised laugh, and then somebody else did. It was the kind of laugh that lets air out of a room.

Wayne wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then he put his hat back on and reached into his coat.

“How many cups you got left?” he asked.

“Forty,” Glenda said. “And six cookies.”

“I’ll take every cup.”

“Uncle Wayne, that’s forty dollars.”

“I can count.” He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. He folded it once and dropped it through the slot in the lid of the can. It made no sound at all.

“And that’s the change,” he said. “You keep it.”

“It’s a dollar,” Glenda said weakly. “A dollar a cup.”

“Not today it ain’t,” said Bud Rader, from the back, and the whole lot broke up.

Wayne turned to the nearest man, a stranger in a Carhartt coat, and handed him a cup. He gave one to the next man. Glenda poured as fast as she could. The cooler gurgled. The steam rolled up in the cold.

In two minutes there were forty men standing in a muddy lot with foam cups of hot cider, and Wayne Tate was handing out snickerdoodles with his own hands.

I stood back and let it happen. I did not say a word. I’d said all I needed to say in September, and I had said it quietly.

That should have been the end of it. But when the cups were gone, and the men had drifted back toward the barn, Wayne sat down on the tailgate of his truck and put his head in his hands.

I walked over. Glenda came with me, with her teal coat zipped to the chin, and sat down on the cold tailgate next to him. Nobody asked her to.

“Wayne,” I said. “You don’t owe us a speech.”

“I owe somebody one.” He lifted his head. His eyes were red. “I owe you the reason. You’ve been waiting three years for it.”

He looked at Glenda. “You want to hear it, honey?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked out across the pens. “Your Aunt Lorraine asked that church for a roof. Two winters running. Not even a new one. A patch. She’d go to the board meetings, and she’d sit in the third row with her purse in her lap, and she’d say, Brothers, it’s raining on the hymnals.”

“They said there wasn’t money. They had money for a new sign out front. A lighted one. Nine hundred dollars. I know because I paid a third of it, thinking I was helping.”

Glenda said nothing. She watched his face the way she watches a calf being born.

“She died in March. Cancer. Four months from the day they found it.” He stopped. His jaw worked. “It rained the morning of the funeral. A hard rain, the ringing kind. You remember how it rings.”