The Keys I Left on His Table

Out the kitchen window, past the machine shed, I could see the ridge. Two Holstein heifers were standing on the near edge of it, the little black dots of them against the brown grass. Those were Katie’s 4-H heifers, Pearl and Daisy, grazing on the back eighty the way they had all summer.

Katie saw me looking. She set her paper plate on the linoleum, carefully, as if it might break, and she studied the floor.

“Cake, Neal?” Ansel said.

“No, thank you.”

I finished my coffee. I carried six plates to the sink. I thanked Ansel for supper, and I shook Arlene’s hand, and I told Roland he’d better get those boys home before the roads iced.

Katie did not say a word the entire nine miles home. When we pulled in she went straight up the stairs, and I heard her door close, softly, not slammed. A slammed door I would have understood.

At eleven that night I was still sitting in our kitchen with the light off.

I had a cup of coffee I had not touched. I kept turning the same question over: what do you do when the man you worked for, without a day off, for fifteen years sells your life out from under you and calls it a birthday present for himself?

Carla came down in her robe and turned on the stove light. She did not say anything for a minute. She sat across from me and folded her hands.

“You are not suing my father,” she said.

“No.”

“I mean it, Neal. I can’t watch that.”

“I know. And there’s nothing to sue over. A handshake in a barn.” I rubbed my face. “I’m not going to a lawyer, Carla. I’m not going to put your dad in a courtroom in Richland Center.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

I had not known the answer until she asked. Then it was just there, plain as a part number.

“Stop,” I said.

She looked at me a long time. I thought she might argue. Her father is her father, and he is old, and he’d had that stent. I would not have blamed her.

She pulled her chair around the table so she was next to me instead of across from me.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m with you.”

That was the whole conversation. I think it was the best one we ever had.

I didn’t sleep. At four I got up and went to the shelf above my workbench in the garage and took down the three green ledgers. They were warm from sitting by the furnace pipe, and they smelled like barn.

I put them in a feed sack. Then I took the key ring out of my pocket and worked the shop keys off it, one at a time. The padlock to the machine shed. The key to the skid steer. The key to the baler barn.

It took about two minutes, and it was the quietest, hardest two minutes of my life.

Katie came to the door of the garage in her socks and her big sweatshirt. She watched me do it. She did not ask what I was doing, and I did not tell her.

“Are you mad at Grandpa?” she said finally.

“No. I’m done working for him, that’s all.”

She nodded the way her mother nods. Then she went back in the house.