The Logbook at the Elevator Scale

“I did come to you, Josh,” I said. “Three times. You said you didn’t have to show me anything.”

He looked down at the counter again. Then he said something I did not expect.

“It was the payment,” he said. Not to the room, just to me. “Every month I watch that money go out the door to buy back a business I built. Every morning I watch you pull out of my yard in my truck. It got in my head.”

“It’s our truck,” I said. “Or it was. I drove it fourteen years.”

“I know,” he said.

I did not say anything else to him. Caden would ask me later what I had said to his father, and I wanted to be able to tell him all of it.

Mike put his cap back on. He stepped up to the counter next to me and looked at Frank. “Darrel’s outfit over by the river still need drivers for fall?”

“Last I heard,” Frank said.

“Then I’m done hauling for Kepler,” Mike said. “I’ll finish today’s load because the farmer needs it in. After that, I’m done.”

He turned to Josh. “Nothing personal. But I drove next to her nine years and let you tell me she was a thief. I’m not doing that twice.”

The two young drivers looked at each other. One of them said, “Us too,” and the other nodded. That was three of Josh’s six drivers gone in about ten seconds.

Josh nodded slowly. He didn’t argue with them, and I will give him credit, he didn’t say one ugly thing. He put his sunglasses in his shirt pocket and stood there and took it.

Then he went out to his pickup. I thought he was leaving.

He came back with the business checkbook instead, the brown one we had used for fourteen years, the one I used to carry in my purse.

He wrote it out against the scale house counter, standing up, while everybody watched. Six thousand two hundred dollars, made out to me. He tore it out and held it toward me.

“It’ll clear,” he said. “I’ll take it out of the truck fund.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I took it.

“Truck seven’s yours for the rest of the season,” he said. “If you want it.”

“I’ll finish today,” I said. “Then I’m going with Mike.”

He nodded.

He looked at Frank, and Frank looked back without any meanness in his face at all, only a kind of tiredness, like a man watching a calf he had pulled get itself hung up in a fence.

“Call me when you’re square with everybody,” Frank said. “I mean it, Josh. Fall’s long.”

Josh went out. We heard his pickup door and his tires on the gravel. A minute later his voice came over the radio again, steady, telling truck two the next field was ready.

Frank started banding his tickets back up. Pam came around the counter and hugged me hard with her reading glasses still pushed up on her head.

“Now get that truck on my scale,” she said into my shoulder. “You’re holding up the whole line.”

When I came back out into the sun, the trucks were still waiting. A driver I barely knew leaned out of his cab and touched his cap. Nobody clapped. They just started rolling again.