The Fence She Finished in His Gloves

The balance said zero dollars and fourteen cents. I was sitting in the family waiting room on the fourth floor in Wichita with the company laptop on my knees, and I read it three times.

Two days before, that account had held $28,406.14. I knew because I kept the books for Moreland-Tillery Fence at our kitchen table every Sunday night, and I had written that number down in pencil.

Down the hall my husband, Brett, had a tube in his throat and a bolt in his skull to measure the pressure on his brain. He was thirty-seven years old. He had not opened his eyes in four days.

I scrolled down to the transactions. One withdrawal, Thursday afternoon, at the branch in Emporia. Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and six dollars even. The teller had stamped it like any other Thursday.

There was only one other person in the world who could walk into a bank and take that money. His name was Rod Tillery, and for six years he had been my husband’s partner.

I called him. It rang five times and went to the message that said his mailbox was full. I called again. Same thing. I texted him, “Rod, the account is empty. Call me.”

The little word under my text said Delivered. Then nothing. A man across the waiting room was eating peanut butter crackers from the vending machine, and the crinkle of the wrapper was the loudest thing in the world.

I put the laptop down on the chair beside me. I did not cry. I had already done all my crying on the helicopter pad four days before, and something in me had gone very quiet and very flat since then.

How We Got There

It had been an ordinary Tuesday in the first week of October. Brett and Rod were loading T-posts in the yard behind our place outside Cottonwood Falls, getting ready for the second half of the Hensley job.

The post trailer was loaded heavy, three bundles of seven-foot T-posts strapped down and a pallet of wire on the front. Brett was up on the deck throwing a ratchet strap over when the strap hook let go.

He stepped back to catch his balance and there was nothing behind him.

He fell five feet and caught the back of his head on the trailer tongue on the way down. Then he landed on the gravel and did not move.

I was in the kitchen. I heard Rod yell my name in a voice I had never heard come out of a grown man.

I ran out in my socks, and Brett was lying on his side with his eyes half open, and his hand was twitching against the rock.

The ambulance came from Cottonwood Falls in fourteen minutes. They called the helicopter before they ever loaded him.

By supper he was in surgery in Wichita with a skull fracture, bleeding on the brain, and two broken vertebrae in his lower back.

Rod drove me down that first night. He sat beside me in the surgical waiting room until two in the morning, holding a cup of coffee he never drank. He kept saying, “That strap was new, Casey. That strap was brand new.”

I believed him. I still believe him about that. It was a new strap, and hooks fail sometimes, and Brett had thrown ten thousand straps in his life without one letting go.

Rod hugged me in the parking garage at two in the morning and said he would hold everything down at home. “You stay with him. I’ll handle the business. Don’t you think about anything but Brett.”

That was a Tuesday. On Thursday he drove to Emporia and emptied the account.