Lavonne did not go home.
She stood where she was, with her folded lawn chair under one arm and her thermos in her hand, and looked up at him. Travis Kemp was six inches taller than she was and forty-five years younger. He was not smiling now.
"I've known you since you were in diapers, Travis," she said. "Your mama brought you to my vacation Bible school when you were four. You bit the Hopper boy."
He blinked.
"So I'm not going home," Lavonne said. "I'm going to stand right here and ask you a question. Whose name is in that second ledger?"
For a long moment, he did not answer. Out front, a pickup honked. Somebody called his name.
Then he sat down on the back step of the office, all at once, and put his face in his hands.
"It's the bank's," he said through his fingers. "Daddy's name is on the note. When he retired, the station was two years behind. The bank said if I couldn't get it current by January, they'd call it. Take the building, the scale, the land. Daddy's house." He looked up. "He doesn't know. I couldn't tell him."
"So you've been shorting the growers."
"Three pounds. Four. On the old folks and the regulars. The ones who wouldn't check." His voice cracked. "The ones like you, Miss Lavonne. I'm sorry. I knew it was wrong. I kept telling myself one more month."
Lavonne set her lawn chair down against the wall.
"How much?"
He told her. It was a lot of money. It was a lot of growers.
"Who's in the second ledger?"
"All of them," Travis said. "Every sack. What it really weighed and what I paid. I kept it so I could pay them back someday." He laughed, a cracked, awful sound. "That's what I told myself, anyway."
Lavonne had been married to Dub Tuttle for fifty-one years. He used to say that the hardest part of farming was not the weather or the prices. It was deciding what kind of neighbor to be when your neighbor was in trouble.
She thought about what Dub would have done.
"Travis," she said. "Here's what's going to happen. You're going to go in there and switch that scale back honest. Right now, with me watching. Then you're going to call your daddy and tell him everything."
His face went white. "He'll kill me."
"He'll want to," Lavonne said. "He won't."
"And then?"
"Then you're going to take that second ledger and pay back every grower in it, to the penny. Starting with the old folks." She held up a hand before he could speak. "I don't care if it takes you five years. You'll make a list, and you'll mail a check every month to somebody on it, and you'll put a note in with it that says what it's for."
He stared at her.
"And if you don't," she said gently, "I'll take Dub's scale and my sack of sweet feed down to the state agriculture office in Oklahoma City and let the inspector weigh it himself. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, ma'am."
She watched him do it.
He went inside and took the little black remote off the wall and opened it with a screwdriver and pulled out the battery. He unplugged a wire behind the readout box. Then he went out front and asked the next farmer in line to wait one minute, and put Lavonne's sack of sweet feed on the platform.
The scale read fifty pounds even.
The farmer in line, an old man named Hollis Burch who had grown pecans on the river since 1968, looked at the number, then at Lavonne, then at Travis. He did not say anything. He did not need to.
Travis's father, Lowell Kemp, drove out to Lavonne's place on Monday morning. He was eighty-one, with a cane and a hearing aid, and he stood on her porch for a long time before he knocked.
When she opened the door, he took off his hat.
"Lavonne," he said. "I raised that boy better than this."
"You did," she said. "He just forgot for a while. Come in and have some coffee."
They sat at her kitchen table for two hours. Lowell Kemp told her the bank had agreed to give the station until June. He was coming out of retirement to run the scale himself. Travis would work the yard and the books, and he would mail a check to a grower on the river every month until the second ledger was paid.
"He's going to tell the growers himself," Lowell said. "One at a time. Face to face. I told him that was the price."
"That's a hard price."
"It's the right one," Lowell said.
The first check came in January. It was made out to Lavonne Tuttle, for the full amount, with interest figured to the day. Inside was a note in Travis Kemp's handwriting.
I'm sorry. You were the first one who checked. Thank you for checking.
Lavonne put the check in the bank. She put the note in her Bible, next to the paper tag from the first sack Dub ever weighed on that old green scale in 1983.
Sherry went back to Tulsa in February. Before she left, she stood in the pecan barn with her mother and looked at Dub's scale for a long time.
"Will you teach me how to use it?" she asked. "Next fall. When I come back for harvest."
Lavonne slid the brass weight along the iron arm until the beam floated level and still.
"You weigh it twice," she said. "Once for you, and once for the buyer. And if they ever disagree, honey, you come ask me."
