The Keys I Left on His Table

Nobody at the table drank their coffee.

Ron Stenger set his cup down on the saucer. Ron is sixty-one, a big slow man who has milked the same herd across the road from Ansel since his own father died. In forty years I had never heard him raise his voice.

“Neal,” Ron said, “I’m short a milker. Nineteen an hour, four to eight, every day. You want it?”

“I’ll be there at four tomorrow,” I said.

Ansel reached for the top ledger.

He opened it to the first page. It was dated November second, 2010, in my block printing, the way I write on a work order. He started to read the first line out loud.

It said: 5:30 to 8:15. Gutters, feed, 42 head. W says, “Welcome to the family business.”

His voice quit on the third word.

I did not stay to watch what came after that. I put my cap back on, and I nodded to Ron and Hugh and Nels, and I walked out the way I had walked in. The screen door slapped behind me.

In the truck I sat for a minute with my hands on the wheel. They were shaking, a little. Not from anger. It was the shake you get after you finally set down something you’ve been carrying so long you forgot it had weight.

Then I drove home. Carla was making pancakes, and Katie was eating them with her feet up on the chair. Nobody asked me anything. Carla put a plate in front of me and kissed the top of my head.

That Sunday afternoon I did something I had not done in fifteen years. I took a nap on a weekend with nothing waiting on me at 5:30.

I slept for three hours, and when I woke up it was dark and Carla had put a blanket over me.

Monday I drove to Ron Stenger’s place in the dark.

His dairy was nothing like Ansel’s. Seventy cows, a double-eight herringbone parlor, a bulk tank the size of a small submarine. Ron’s boy ran the crops, and Ron ran the milking, and for the first week I mostly followed him around learning where everything was.

It was a strange thing to walk into a barn and not know where the light switches were. For fifteen years I had known Ansel’s barn with my eyes closed. This was a clean, bright, well-kept parlor, and the cows came in by number, and it ran like a good engine.

About ten days in, Katie showed up in the barn after school. She had walked the half mile across the field in her barn boots. She had a bottle in one hand and a green ledger in the other.

I recognized the ledger right away. It was the third one. I had left all three on Ansel’s table.

“Grandpa Ansel’s in the kitchen,” she said. She never once called him anything but Grandpa. “Uncle Roland drove up yesterday and went in there, and when he came out he gave me this.”

“Roland did?”

“He said Grandpa had them in the gun cabinet. He said Grandpa had been reading them.” She held it out. “Dad. Look at the back page.”

I took it. I opened the cover and turned to the last page, the one I always left blank.