The one thing I meant to do was find that box.
I knew it was not stolen, because I knew that back room better than my own kitchen, and a box does not walk off a shelf, it gets put in the wrong place by a spring kid in a hurry. It was planting season, and somewhere in that room was a part a farmer was counting on to get his rig back in the field, and I was not going to let a boy managers lie leave a man stranded in his own dirt. So I drove out before the gates opened, let myself into the room I had run for thirty-two years, and started looking.
Found it in twenty minutes. Two aisles over from where it belonged, up on the wrong shelf, shoved behind the belts, exactly where a kid learning the bins would set it and forget it.
Not missing. Just misplaced. Every part in that box accounted for, sitting right there, the whole reason for my thirty-two years ending in one careless afternoon.
I held the box that a man had called me a thief over, and I thought about how many thousands of parts had passed through my hands without one going astray, and how it took a green kid three weeks in to lose one where only I would ever think to look.
I set it on the counter where it belonged. And then the bell over the door went, early as it was.
It was a farmer. Not just any one, either. It was the young fella I had spotted a belt on credit years back when his whole harvest hung on it, grown now with a place of his own. He had heard at the feed store what happened to me, and had come at dawn to say his piece to that manager, and found me instead, standing there with the box that cleared me.
That man got on the phone to the owners who were driving in for my cookout, and he was not the only farmer who called that morning. Word travels fast in a county whose crops I had kept going for three decades.
The owners met me at that cookout with the box on the table and a lot of red faces. The boy manager who could not be bothered to check his own shelves before he swung is not their manager anymore.
They asked me to come back. I told them I had earned my rest, but I would stay a month to teach the spring kid the bins, so no farmer ever gets stranded and no honest man ever gets blamed for a box that was only ever two aisles over.
Thirty-two years, and that back room kept my name for me, same as it always had.
