She folded his receipt into a clean envelope from her purse. Then she placed two fingers against the back of his neck, the way she had when he was much younger.
"We'll make one telephone call," she said. "Then we'll decide what we can do."
---
The call went to Hank Turner.
Hank operated a one-truck machinery hauling business from a cinder-block garage south of town. 20 years earlier, when Hank's first rollback barely paid for its own fuel, the winch gearbox had failed. Walter Hale had rebuilt it after supper and charged only for the bearings. Hank remembered.
He asked Beth for the cabinet's height, width, floor conditions, and distance from the loading door. He asked whether the base had fork openings and whether the doors could be strapped without pulling them out of square.
Then he said, "Tell Owen I'll be there at eight."
Sunday morning, Hank arrived with his rollback, an adult assistant, a hydraulic toe jack, machinery skates, oak timbers, steel plates, and more patience than the auction crowd had brought.
Dale arrived, too. He leaned against his pickup in the same red vest, drinking coffee and explaining to anyone nearby that they were about to witness a $200 move for $30 worth of rust.
Hank ignored him. He walked around the cabinet, measured the doorway, and pressed a level against the base. Then he looked at Owen. "You bought it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then you tell me where it's going."
"The workshop behind our house, please."
Hank nodded as if Owen had just given him the destination for a commercial machine. He marked a safe line across the floor and told Owen to stand beyond it. Owen's job was to keep spectators from entering the working area and to watch the right-hand door for any change in its gap.
The toe jack lifted the cabinet less than an inch. Hank slid cribbing beneath the base, reset the jack, and raised it again. Each movement was small enough to seem unimportant until the cabinet stood high enough for the first machinery skate.
A loose object shifted inside with a dull iron clunk.
Dale raised his cup. "There's your treasure! Sounds like a bucket of busted drill bits!"
A few people laughed. Hank's assistant positioned the second skate. They eased the cabinet forward with a come-along, guiding its weight instead of trying to overpower it.
At the threshold, the left skate caught in a seam between the annex floor and the loading pad. The cable tightened and hummed. Owen saw the right-hand door gap narrow.
"It moved!" he called.
Hank stopped immediately. He released the pressure, backed the cabinet half an inch, and bridged the seam with a steel plate. Nobody laughed during that part: 900 pounds of steel had a way of restoring seriousness.
The cabinet rolled again. Its base crossed the plate, passed beneath the loading door, and entered daylight for the first time in years. Hank lowered the rollback to a shallow angle. He attached the winch to the cabinet's base—never to its doors—and drew it up the bed a few inches at a time. His assistant kept the cabinet upright with guide lines while Owen watched from the marked boundary.
Dale called across the lot, "Leave the truck running when you get there! You'll want that thing back on it!"
Owen gave him no answer.