The Tools My Brother Pawned

I do the books at the Farmers Co-op elevator in town. I make a living and no more than that. Lucas’s father drives a truck over the road for a freight line out of Columbus, and he does what he can, but what he can do is mostly send a check when he remembers.

He bought the set on the seventh of August, off the tool truck that stops in the feed store lot every Thursday. I stood beside him while he counted it out.

Twenty-six hundred dollars in twenties, a stack as thick as a sandwich, and the man who ran the truck counted it twice and then shook Lucas’s hand like he was a grown contractor.

Hollie, who has worked the register at the feed store for twenty-two years, came out onto the porch to watch. She does not come out for much.

We rent a small house in town with a one-car carport and a washer that lives in the kitchen. There was nowhere to put a five-drawer cabinet.

My brother said, “Put it in my barn, Lee. It’ll be dry and nobody goes in there. It’s safer than your place.” I said yes before he had finished asking.

“Brent,” I said now, in the barn, “tell me who has it.”

“I told you. A guy.”

“What guy?”

“Leanne.” He used the whole name, which he only does when he wants me to feel like the unreasonable one. “I said I’ll get it back. Give me a few days. You’re making this into something.”

“Classes start Monday,” Lucas said.

It was the only thing he said. He said it to the pale floor, not to either of us, and then he turned around and walked out into the sun and sat on the tailgate of my car with the list in his hands.

I looked at my brother. He looked at the rag.

I looked through the open door at my son’s back, the slope of his shoulders, the sunburn on his neck from two Julys, and I knew no sentence I had would put one wrench in his hand.

“Okay,” I said.

And I left.

I did not call the sheriff, and I will answer that now because a number of people have asked. A report on my own brother would have given me a case number and a long wait.

It would not have put a torque wrench in my son’s hand by Monday. And what I did not say in the barn was that by then I suspected where the cabinet was, and a deputy would have found out the same thing I did, which was that Brent had signed his own name to it.

Besides, I had three hundred and twelve dollars in checking until Friday.

His father called around nine from a truck stop in Amarillo.

I told Chad the whole thing, flat, in about two minutes. He said a word I will not put on this page. Then he said he would call Brent himself, and he did, three times, and Brent never picked up.

Chad also said he could get three hundred dollars to Lucas by Friday, and he did. I mention it because my son’s father is not the man in this story who did wrong.

He did what a man six states away could do. Three hundred dollars is not twenty-six hundred, but it is not nothing, and Lucas folded the check and put it in his wallet without a word.