The Cans My Daughter Collected

I will tell you what I knew. If I called him a thief in his own driveway, I would get a lie and an empty barn by supper. He would say the cans were a family gift, or that they were not worth anything, or that Lacey had misunderstood. He is a good talker, and he had a face ready for every one of those.

So I put the truck in gear.

“Where are we going?” Lacey asked. She had her notebook open on her knees and was not writing in it.

“To see a man about a scale.”

Hostetler Metals sits off Route 30, about nine miles from town, behind a chain link fence and a long row of crushed cars stacked three high. There is a gravel lot, a steel office with cream siding, and a truck scale out front that has been weighing this county’s junk since before I was born.

When the flatbed pulled off, Ralph came across the lot wiping his hands on a red rag.

“Whitney Brooks, as I live and breathe.” His face went soft when he saw Lacey. “And this must be the young lady I keep hearing about.”

“Ralph.” I kept my voice level. “I need to ask you something. I need you to be straight with me, and I need you not to ask me why yet.”

“Go ahead.” “Did Barry Carver bring you a load of aluminum cans this fall?”

I watched it land on him. Not on his face so much as in his shoulders. He looked at me, and then he looked down at Lacey, and he took off the blue cap and held it against his leg.

“Come in the office, you two,” he said. “I’ve got a pot on.”

Then he pulled open the top drawer of a tall gray filing cabinet.

“State of Ohio makes us keep records,” he said, to the drawer more than to us. “Every load that crosses my scale. Name, license, plate, weight, what we paid. I keep a copy of every ticket whether the law says to or not.”

He thumbed through folders, and his thumb stopped. “Twelve days ago,” he said. “A Monday.”

He laid a pink carbon sheet on the desk and turned it so the writing faced Lacey.

She followed the lines with one finger, the way she does when a word is hard.

Date. Customer. A plate number I recognized, because I had parked behind that Ram at Thanksgiving for six years running. Material: aluminum cans, clean. Gross weight on the truck and trailer. Tare. Net.

“Two thousand four pounds,” Lacey read out. Then, because she is who she is, she said, “I said about two thousand. I was only off four.”

I made a sound I did not mean to make.

“Fifty-five cents a pound,” Ralph said quietly. “That was the price that week. Eleven hundred and two dollars and twenty cents. I paid it in cash out of the drawer, because he asked for cash.”

At the bottom of the sheet was a line for a signature, and on the line, in blue ballpoint, in the big looping hand I had seen on every birthday card since I was small, it said Barry Carver.