The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

What I Never Said

I should tell you about Vesta, and I should tell it plainly, because plain is the only way I know how to say a thing like this.

In the fall of 1997, the Ellard school district had a federal grant for the shop program, and the paperwork on it was bad enough that the superintendent sent me over to the county extension office to see about getting it straightened. I was forty-five. I had been married to Lila for eleven years. We were not unhappy, and I do not want you to think we were. Lila taught second grade and read the paper aloud to me at supper and could not carry a tune in a bucket. I loved her. I would like that to be on the record in the same ink as everything else.

The woman who kept the books at the extension office was Vesta Rigby, then forty-three, with a pencil behind her ear and a way of reading a purchase order with her whole face. She went through my receipts for two hours. When she was done she squared the pile on the desk and said, “Mr. Ruebush, this is the neatest hand I have seen on a purchase order in nineteen years.” She said it the way you might say the weather. And I walked out of that building into the parking lot and stood by my truck for a quarter of an hour with the keys in my hand, because I knew something about myself I could not put anywhere.

That was all that happened. I want to be exact about that, since I know how this sounds. I did not do one thing in twenty-eight years that I would not have done in front of Lila, or Maynard, or the Lord. I said “morning, Vesta” at the grocery. I fixed a drawer for her in 2003 and she paid me with a pie. Every morning I watched Maynard get up at half past eight with his thermos and say, “Well, Vesta will want the car,” and I thought: that is a lucky man. And I put it back where it lives.

Lila died in March of 2019 of a stroke, quickly, in the kitchen, on a Tuesday. I will not say more about that. Vesta came to the funeral and held my hand in both of hers in the line, and she said, “She was so proud of you, Amos,” and I said, “I know,” and I went home to a house that had never in thirty-three years been quiet.

For seven years after, I did not look at what I had put away. Then, in June of this year, Maynard got a diagnosis in Waterloo.