The Ledgers Behind The Grain Hauling Sale

Monday

On Monday, the second of November, I drove to the Holdrege yard at seven in the morning.

I had worked my last day at the bank the Friday before, a few days past my notice, because Mr. Heiser asked and I owed him.

The gravel lot was wet, the sky was the pale clear blue it gets in early November, and the cornfields on the south side were stripped down to stubble.

There was a new sign over the shop door. I had not seen it go up. It said Danner Ag Transport, Holdrege Yard, in plain white letters on dark green.

Dad’s name was gone from the door and, I realized, from the trucks.

I stood there a minute with a travel mug in my hand.

I looked at the trucks lined up in the yard, nine of them, washed and gleaming, now carrying someone else’s name on the doors.

I missed Dad then, hard, the way you miss someone at the exact moment you are least ready.

Then Lamar Kaster came around the end of the shop in his heavy coat, with his cap in his hand, and said, “Morning, boss.”

“I am not the boss, Lamar.”

“You are in the office,” he said. “That is the boss, as far as I have ever seen.” He pointed with his chin at the door. “Coffee’s on. Cliff made it. It’s terrible.”

The office was a small room with a steel desk and a window onto the yard. Someone had put a vase of grocery-store mums on the desk, yellow ones, with no card.

On the corner of the desk sat a new green columnar ledger, still in its cellophane.

I sat down. I picked up the ledger and turned it over in my hands.

A sticky note was stuck to the cover in Craig Danner’s blocky handwriting, and I will tell you what it said, because I have kept it.

It said, “For whatever you want to put in it. No rush.”

I did not write anything in the book that day. I put it in the top drawer, the way you would put away a gift you intended to enjoy later.

Then I turned on the computer, pulled up the payroll, and got to work.

I was tired in a clean way, the way you are after work you were paid for.

Curt had supper on the table. It was pork chops and green beans and Mama’s apple pie, and the table was bare of anything else.

No calculator, no stack of settlement sheets, no legal pad. Brooklyn had driven in from Kearney for the night, and she sat across from me in her scrubs, with her feet tucked under her.

“It’s quiet,” she said, looking around the kitchen.

“It is,” I said.

“I might not be able to sleep.”

“Try,” I said. “I will be right down the hall.”

I sat at my own kitchen table with my own family, and nobody asked me for one more quarter.

I have not heard from Troy since the day he came to the house, not a call or a card.

I imagine we will find our way to a Thanksgiving at Mama’s table, and I imagine it will be polite.

I do not know whether it will ever be more than that, and I have decided to be at peace with not knowing.

The gift card, I should say, stayed on the tablecloth by Troy’s plate. Candace the waitress found it the next morning among the crumbs, and I like to think she spent it on something for herself.

I think about that line in the front of the old green ledger more than I think about the money. Dad’s books. Till harvest. T.

I wrote it in pencil, and I meant it, and for nineteen years nobody ever came to tell me that harvest was over.

It is over now. I finally came to tell myself.