The Taco Trailer That Crossed the Street

I wanted to drive to the village hall and put my fist through something.

I did not do that. I have raised two kids and kept books for the elevator for fourteen years, and one thing the books teach you is that a hot feeling is a bad bookkeeper.

It adds wrong. You get to the bottom of the page and find out you owe yourself an apology.

So I said, “You’re not selling anything. Go wash up. We’re eating at six.” That night Marvin came home at nine, gray with dust from the terminal, and he sat at the table with his supper going cold and listened to the whole story from Mallory and from me.

When she finished, he put down his fork.

“I talked to him this morning,” he said. “Before you came in with the thermos, I talked to him for ten minutes. I told him she’d done every single thing the county asked. He said the board voted, not him.”

“Did you ask him to take it back?”

“I did.” Marvin rubbed his eyes. “He said business is business.”

“Then why didn’t you say something this morning?” I had not meant it to sound the way it sounded. He flinched.

“Because I’m hauling beans till dark for the next three weeks,” Marvin said quietly. “Because I’d have said something I couldn’t take back, in front of eleven people. And because he’s my brother, Jean, and I’m still trying to figure out how to do this without losing him.”

I put my hand over his hand. His knuckles were cracked and gray with soybean dust, and I felt a little ashamed.

“I’m not going to ask you to lose him,” I said.

“I know,” Marvin said. “That’s why I married you.” The board’s next regular meeting was the first Monday of the month. November 2. Almost four weeks out.

Mallory’s pork was already thawed in the Legion walk in. The pork shoulder alone had cost $410, and the clock on it was ticking.

And the permit, I noticed, said public street or right of way. I read that phrase four times. At six the next morning, before the elevator opened, I sat in the truck in the empty lot and looked at my phone.

Then I did something I had not planned to do. I called Haldane Implement.

Haldane Implement is the farm equipment dealer in Fenwick, a long steel shop, a row of green tractors and red combines out front, and a gravel and blacktop lot big enough to hold forty machines. It sits on the corner of Main and Cedar, directly across Main Street from the front door of Russ’s Diner.

I had never once thought of that as a coincidence. Now I thought of nothing else. Clyde Haldane picked up on the second ring. He is a big, tired man in his sixties who drives a pickup older than his parts manager.

He has sold a tractor to nearly every family in this town.

“Jean,” he said. “You’re up early.” I told him the whole thing. It took four minutes. I did not raise my voice and I did not cry, and when I finished there was a long quiet on the line.

“Is Mallory the one with the trailer?” he said. “The carnitas?”

“Yes, Clyde.”

“I was at the Legion on the twenty sixth,” he said. “I ate three tacos. I stood in that line forty minutes and I’d have stood another forty.” I heard a chair creak. “Jean, that lot belongs to me.