I said, “I burned the first four.” He said, “I believe that.” And the whole room laughed, a loose, loud laugh that went on a good while, and I felt something in my chest give that had been tight since a Saturday five years before.
A rancher from two counties over, a stranger to me, came up to the cutting table afterward and set his empty plate down.
He said, “My son and I have not spoken since the funeral of his mother.” I said, “That is a long time.” He said, “It is eleven months,” and stood holding his blaze orange cap flat against his chest.
I did not tell him what to do. I do not know what he did.
But he stood a minute by the hooks where my son’s apron hangs, and then he bought two steaks and went home.
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We gave away forty of my best ribeyes that hour, a little under a thousand dollars of meat. We closed the counter for fifty-five minutes on the biggest day of the year.
A few customers left and did not come back, and I did not blame them. The register was down more than two thousand dollars when we balanced it that night.
I did not mind.
I had expected it to feel like a sacrifice, and it felt more like putting down a sack I had carried so long I thought it was my own back.
At the end of the day, after the last hunter had gone, I stood alone in the cutting room with the white paper on the table ringed with coffee and sauce.
Selby came and stood beside me. He did not say anything for a while.
Then he took a clean plate off the stack, sliced the last end of the ribeye, and set it in front of me.
I picked up the fork. I tasted it, standing at my own cutting table.
It was right. It was salted exactly right. I said so out loud to nobody, and Selby put his hand on the back of my neck, the way Vespera used to.
Nothing happened for three days.
I want to say that clearly, because a man in my position wants to promise you a reunion. There was no phone call that night and no truck in the lot on Sunday.
I said Vespera’s grace over the oldest steak, all the way through, with my eyes open. I got to the line about the boy, and there was no one to say it back.
On Monday I opened the shop at six, as I always do.
On Tuesday morning, November 3, a little after ten, Selby came into the cold room, where I was breaking down a side of beef, with a small padded envelope in his hand and his ears red.
He said, “It was in the box at the front. There is no return name. It is postmarked Indianapolis.” He did not say anything else.
A town of nine hundred does not keep a thing like Saturday inside its walls. Somebody tells somebody.