The Tools My Brother Pawned

Wednesday morning I called in to the elevator and told them I’d be late. Then I drove to Mansfield.

There are two pawn shops in Mansfield that anyone in our county would know. I tried the one nearer the highway, because my brother has never been a man who drives farther than he has to.

A bell on the door. A glass case of wedding rings and guitars and gold chains. And behind the counter, a heavy man of about sixty with reading glasses on a cord who looked up from a crossword.

“Help you?”

“I’m looking for a set of tools,” I said. “A rolling cabinet, red, five drawers. It would have come in last Friday.”

He looked at me over his glasses, and I watched him decide what kind of woman I was. Whatever he decided, he put the pen down.

“Who’s asking?”

“Leanne Whitcomb. It’s my son’s. My brother brought it in. I would like to know what he got for it.”

The man’s name was Herbert. He had a way of wiping his hands on his shirt before he touched paper. He pulled a carbon ticket from a drawer, laid it on the glass, and turned it so I could read it.

My brother’s name was on the line. Brent Dawson. His driver’s license number, written in. His signature, the same loopy R I had watched him sign on birthday cards for thirty years.

At the top of the ticket, in Herbert’s block letters, one word was circled. Sale.

“He didn’t take a loan on it,” Herbert said quietly. “A loan, he would have had thirty days to come back and get it. He wanted it sold, so I bought it. Six hundred forty dollars, cash.”

Six hundred and forty. For twenty-six hundred dollars of tools that had been paid for with two summers of my son’s life.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Herbert said. He sounded it. “I put it in the case Friday afternoon. A mobile mechanic out of Findlay came through Saturday morning, drove a van, knew exactly what he was looking at. He paid eighteen-fifty and loaded it himself. I don’t have a name. He paid cash, too.”

“Did my brother say it was his?”

“He said it was his. He had a toolbox story about downsizing.” Herbert took his glasses off. “I don’t ask more than that. I should have. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate you telling me.”

I walked out into the parking lot and sat in the car with the engine off.

I called my brother from that parking lot, and for once he answered.

“I went to Herbert’s,” I said.

He did not say anything. I could hear a diesel idling in the background, probably his own.

“Why, Brent?”

He breathed out hard through his nose. Then, to my surprise, he told me, and the telling came fast, as if it had been sitting behind his teeth all week.

He owed twenty-one hundred dollars on a credit card. He had run it up over the football season last year and again this spring, on betting apps on his phone, the kind that give you a free bet to start and then never let you go.

He had thought he was good at it. Everyone thinks that. The card company had started calling his job. His truck payment was due Friday, four hundred and eighty dollars, and he had a hundred and ten dollars to his name.