The Locker I Filled for My Son

I knew what I owed. It was not a telephone call. A call would have been about me, about my guilt and my fear and what I could stand.

What I owed my son was the thing I had done to him, and I had done it in front of forty people.

My birthday had come that September, my sixty-third, and nobody did anything, and I was glad.

I said to myself that if I was going to undo it, I would undo it the same way I had done it, out loud, with the whole line watching.

I had about six weeks to get ready, and the first thing I learned is that I cannot cook.

I knew meat. I could tell you the age of a steer by the color of the fat.

But in Vespera’s cast-iron pan, with her recipe card for short ribs propped against the toaster, I burned the first batch and left the second one gray. The third was tough, and the fourth had no taste at all.

I did not know about the salt. I want you to know that. The one thing I had been wrong about, and I did not know how to be right about it.

On the fifth try, a Sunday afternoon in early September, Avis came over with her own black pot and a bag of shallots and stood at my elbow without a word of advice until I had the sauce right.

She tasted it and said, “Needs salt,” and we both laughed until I had to sit down on Vespera’s kitchen chair.

I practiced for six more weeks. I bought forty white salad plates from a restaurant supply in Jasper, plain ones, the size of my hand, for a little over three hundred dollars.

I told Selby only that I would close the counter for an hour on the Saturday before opening day and he was not to argue.

He argued. He said that Saturday was ninety-four hundred dollars at the register last year and the rest of the winter was lean.

I said I knew what the day was worth, which is why I picked it.

Cost matters to a man like me. I do not say it to be noble.

I say it because a sorry that costs nothing is not worth the breath it takes, and I had been paying for the other kind of thing for five years.

Saturday, October 31, the Saturday before opening day, came cold and bright, with frost on the loading dock and the first deer of the season already hanging in the cooler.

By eleven the shop was three deep in blaze orange again, the same boots, the same Styrofoam cups, a lot of the same faces.

There were more than forty in that room.

I will not say I counted them, because I did not, but I could see them, and Vance Ruckle was by the walk-in door with his cap in both hands.

At noon I walked to the register and told Dorsett to lock it. He looked at me and did what I said.

I told the room to stay where they stood. A few grumbled.