The Tab on the Coffee Bench

I paid $11,840 of my brother’s tires, parts and beer runs off our father’s account at Brandt Farm and Feed out of my own savings, and then on Saturday morning I sat down on the coffee bench and waited for Dwight to say it.

Brandt’s opens at six-thirty, but the Saturday men start coming at seven.

The store smells the way it has smelled my whole life. Molasses, cold concrete, leather, and the dust that rises off fifty-pound sacks of cattle cubes when somebody drops one on the pallet.

There is a woodstove at the back, and along the east wall sits an old church pew that Cecil Brandt’s father hauled out of a Lutheran building in 1974. That pew is the coffee bench. Half the business of Aldrich, Kansas, gets settled there before the sun is all the way up, and my father has had the end of it since before I was in high school.

Arlen Pruitt is eighty-four years old. He raised wheat and Hereford cattle on the same section outside Aldrich for sixty years, and for the last four of them he has been going blind from the middle outward.

The doctors call it macular degeneration. My father calls it “the fog.”

He can see that a person is standing in front of him. He cannot see a face, and he cannot read a word of print, not a seed tag, not a bank statement, not a feed store receipt.

I had not sat on that pew on a Saturday morning since my mother’s funeral six years ago.

That morning I sat down next to my father and set my purse on my knees. Harlan Voss, who is eighty-eight and has never once been surprised by anything, looked at me over his coffee and said, “Well, Imogene.”

“Harlan,” I said.

“Been a while.”

“It has.”

He glanced at the front door, then at the counter, then back at me, and he did not say another word. That told me everybody on that bench already knew why I was there.

Everybody except the one person about to walk through the door.

Let me tell you how I came to be sitting there.

On the Tuesday before, my phone rang at ten past eight in the morning while I stood at the counter of the dental office in Salina where I have kept the books for twenty-two years.

The screen said Brandt Feed.

“Imogene, it’s Cecil.” He did not say hello and he did not ask how I was. “I need you to come out to the store. I need you to come when your father isn’t with you, and I need you not to mention it to Dwight.”

My stomach turned over, slow.

“Is Pa all right?”

“He’s fine. Nobody’s hurt.” He breathed out. “It’s the account. I’d rather you see it than have me say it over the phone.”

I told the office manager I had a family matter and drove the forty-one miles south on the county blacktop, wheat stubble going by gold on both sides.

I guessed a bounced check. I never once guessed my brother.

Cecil Brandt is sixty-seven, a big soft man with forearms like fence posts and reading glasses on a cord. He took over the store from his father in 1991, a young man with a note he could not make, and my father walked into the Farmers State Bank and put his own name on it. Cecil does not tell that story. My mother told it to me at the kitchen sink.