I can run them. That is the whole trouble. I have stood and watched it three thousand times and I could work you at a bus stop.
The propane man came out in January because our regulator was icing and I stood at my own counter and watched my husband work him over in under two minutes.
“Cordell,” Lloyd said, at the door, before the man had his gloves off. That is the first one. He puts your name at the front of the sentence like a hand on your shoulder.
“Mr. Kestler.”
“Cordell, I’m going to ask you something and I want the real answer. Is this regulator the problem or is it the tank.”
That is the second one. He asks you a thing he already knows the answer to, so the saying of it belongs to you. Cordell Sisk stood in my kitchen for a good forty seconds explaining tank pressure to a man who taught tank pressure for eighteen years, and my husband listened to him like he was hearing about it for the first time in his life.
Then Lloyd said, “You’re the one that came out on Christmas Eve for the Rendletons.”
Cordell went red across the neck.
“That was you,” Lloyd said. “Maudie told me. Their girl was on oxygen.”
That is the third one, and the third one is the one that does the damage. He tells you, in front of somebody, a thing you did that you are proud of and did not know anybody saw. I have seen grown men come apart over it in the lot outside the career center.
Cordell Sisk did not charge us for the trip. He stood in the drive another ten minutes telling Lloyd about a tank he was going to buy, and Lloyd asked him two things about it, and Cordell drove off down our road happier than he had come up it.
Lloyd came in and washed his hands and said the regulator was fine and it was the tank, which is what Cordell had said, which is what Lloyd had known standing at the door.
I have been married to Lloyd Kestler for thirty-one years and I could number his moves before our daughter was in school. Here is the sentence I built out of that, and I said it around this county for a long time, and people repeated it back to me for years like it was a proverb.
His warmth is a skill. And a skill is a thing you use.
Lloyd taught welding out at the career center in Ewing for eighteen years and then ran the place for twelve. If you get a weld done in this county it was probably done by somebody he had at seventeen. He gives the invocation. He emcees the fair pageant and the fire district’s dedication and the fish fry. When somebody in three townships dies young, Lloyd is who the family asks to talk, and he says yes every time, and he is uncommonly good at it, and I have sat in a great many pews watching the back of my husband’s head.
Nobody Calls Me to Open Things
They put a new bay on the fire station at Ewing in 2019 and Lloyd cut the ribbon, and I stood in the crowd with a paper cup, and a woman I went to grade school with came over and said the thing that gets said to me.
“You must just be so proud.”
“I am.”
“He’s a special man.” She was watching him across the lot with the scissors. “How does anybody keep up with him?”
I said something. I have said something a thousand times.
That is the reception on a man like this and it does not vary. He is a treasure, he is a blessing to this county, they broke the mold. In thirty-one years not one person has asked me a single question about what it is like, because the question never occurs to anybody, because there is not thought to be anything to it.
Now here is the thing that goes with it. A woman who did what Lloyd does would not get one word of that. She would get a different vocabulary altogether and she would get it behind her back, and that belongs to somebody else to write.
The paper out of Benton did a piece on him in 2013 when the program hit some number. There is a photograph of my husband in a welding hood with a boy, and eleven paragraphs, and I am in the tenth one. His wife of twenty years, who keeps bees.
I am not putting that in as a grievance. I did not want eleven paragraphs. What I want on the page is that I cut it out and kept it, and that I have taken it out of the drawer more than once, and that I could not say what it is I go looking for in it.
Ovella asked me one time at Easter what Lloyd was like at home, and I said the same, and she said no but really, and I said Ovella, he is the same.
“That’s kind of a lot,” she said, and got up to get the pie, and that is the nearest anybody in this family has ever come.
What I did with all of it was decide I was the only person in the county with the eyes to see it. My husband was performing an operation on everyone he met and I was the person in it who could name the parts, and that made me right, and being right at a fire station dedication with a paper cup in your hand is a thing a person can live on for a surprisingly long time.
Five Years to Make One
I keep bees. I have somewhere between forty and sixty hives depending on the year and what the winter did, and the money in it, such as it is, comes off queens.
Raising queens is not keeping bees. You take larvae under thirty-six hours old out of a colony you have decided is worth something, you graft them into cups, and you put them up in a colony you have made queenless on purpose so it will raise them out of grief. Then the virgins fly and mate and three weeks later you find out whether you have got anything.
To have a line you can stand behind takes five years. Five seasons of grafting off the same mothers and watching what the daughters do in February, because February is where the truth is. Anybody can have good bees in June. I registered nothing and I have no papers on anything, but there are about ninety hives across three counties that come off my breeder queens and I know where every one of them is.
Here is the part of it that matters to what comes later, and in thirty-one years it never once occurred to me.
A colony without a queen makes a sound. I do not mean it is louder. It is a different note, higher and ragged around the edge, and it comes up out of the box before you have the lid off, and once you can hear it you cannot stop hearing it. You put a caged queen in that evening and by the next afternoon the whole thing has gone quiet and gotten on with itself.
I can hear it from the truck. Thirty years of that. Lavada Penrod, who I will get to, asked me once at a meeting how I knew, and I said I could not tell her how, I just knew, and she said that was the only honest answer anybody had given her all day.
A man came out from over past Marion two Junes ago wanting six queens and I would not sell him any. His money was good and his boxes were not: wet boxes with old black comb in them and a mite load he had never gone looking for.
“I’d be selling you six queens to kill,” I said.
He stood in my yard a good while. Then he asked what he ought to do about it, and I laid the whole of it out for him, and he came back the next spring and I sold him eight.
That is how I do business start to finish, and it has never in my life struck me as handling anybody.
Nobody in my trade has ever called that a trick.
What I Said at Speer’s
Speer’s is a tavern out on the blacktop with five booths and a pool table nobody uses and Arlis Speer’s father’s picture over the register.
In the fall of 2016 I was in the second booth with three women I have known my whole life and we had gotten onto husbands, the way you do, and I was funny about mine, the way I was.
“He worked the propane man,” I said. “Free service call. Two minutes.”
“That’s a gift.”
“It’s a trade,” I said. “Same as welding. He learned it and he practices it and he uses it, and I’m telling you there’s a man in there running it, and if you ever catch yourself walking out of a room with Lloyd Kestler feeling good about yourself, you want to go back and check what you agreed to.”
I got the laugh. I want to be plain that I got the laugh and that I liked it. I had a good voice for that room and I had thirty years of material and I was the only person in three townships allowed to say a hard thing about Lloyd, and that was a kind of standing, and I had it.
Wilnora Odle said I did not mean it. I said I meant every word, that I was not calling my husband a liar, that he had a trade and the trade was people and the reason nobody in that county could see it was that he was good at it.
“Watch him at a funeral sometime,” I said. “Watch which pew he goes to first.”
The table went a little quiet for about a second and I let it go by, and then somebody started in about Arlis’s pool table and we were off it.
There were people in the other booths. It is a small building and Arlis has never had music in it.
That night stayed out of my head for two years.
Two Kids at a Table
Tori Absher came through the program in 2015 and was not a welder and everybody including her knew it, and Lloyd kept her anyway and got her put on at the clinic doing something in the back and then started on her about the nursing program at the junior college.
He worked on that girl for two years. I watched him do it at our own kitchen table. She would come by for a form she needed signed and be there an hour and a half.
“You already do the job, Tori. They’re just going to make you pay for the paper.”
“I can’t do the math part.”
“Who told you that.”
“Everybody.”
“Name one.”
She could not, and she sat there working her thumb on the edge of the table, and Lloyd let it sit for a while and then said, “Nedra failed that same class twice and she’s got a house.”
She started the applications in the spring of 2018.
The other one at that table was Denzil Karnes, who was there the same two years and got the same treatment and did go, out to a pipe outfit in the Dakotas, and calls on Christmas and has never once come back through.
I watched Lloyd do the two of them in the same week in the fall of 2017. Denzil sat where Tori sat and Lloyd said, “You’re the only one in that shop who cleans up before he’s told.”
“Somebody’s got to.”
“Name me who else does it.”
Denzil could not.
Two kids at one table and the same man doing the same thing to both of them, and I sat at the stove with my back to it thinking, in words, he is going to get what he wants out of both of these children. I have never worked out what I thought he wanted.
In April of that year Tori Absher was at Speer’s on a Friday with a man she was seeing, and she was in the fourth booth, and I did not see her, and if I had seen her I would have said every word of it anyway because I always did.
She never turned the applications in.
I did not learn any of this for six years. Her aunt told me out in the lot at the funeral home in Benton, in the manner of a woman who has decided to say a thing at last. She said Tori came home that night and said, out loud, in her aunt’s kitchen, I’m one of his projects.
Tori is thirty-two and she works at the clinic doing something in the back. She has two kids. She is fine and do not make anything of the word fine, because I have used it on myself.
Move Three
I want to put this one down carefully because it is mine.
Lloyd retired from the career center in 2021 and did not retire from anything else. He came off one board and went onto two. In the spring of 2022 the district wanted him to run the capital campaign for the new welding lab, which was two years of Wednesday nights and a hundred phone calls, and I did not want him doing it, and I had said so for a month in every ordinary way a wife has and I had lost every one of them.
So on a Sunday, at that table, with his sister Ovella sitting right there, I ran the third one on him.
“Ovella, did he ever tell you what he did about the Dilbeck boy?”
Lloyd said, “Delores.”
“He drove to Cape twice a month for a year and a half. Nobody asked him to. Nobody knew. He never put it on a form and he never told one person in this county and I know it only because the gas receipts were in the truck.” I looked at my husband. “You went out there in the ice storm. You told me you were at the school.”
He did not say anything.
Ovella said, “Lloyd.”
And I watched my husband, who has moved every room he has ever walked into, sit at his own kitchen table and go soft in the face like a boy, and he could not find one thing to do with his hands.
Forty minutes later he said he might let the campaign go to somebody younger.
In the truck coming home from her place he was quiet a long time and then he said, “That was a kind thing to say about me.”
He thanked me. He put his hand on the back of my seat when he backed out of her drive, and he thanked me for it, and he had no idea in this world what had been done to him.
I understood something on that ride and I had nowhere to put it for two more years. He had no guard up. None. A man who reads every person who comes at him had nothing at all in the way, and I had just walked in the front.
The Twenty Minutes Before
Kelby Rife went through in 2011 and was killed on a job at the grain facility at Cobden in August of 2023, twenty-six years old, and his mother asked Lloyd to talk at the service.
Kelby’s mother called our house and I answered it and told her how sorry I was, and she asked, in the flat voice people use for the fourth call of that kind of afternoon, whether Lloyd would talk at the service.
I got him off the mower. He took the phone standing in the kitchen with grass all up his legs and he said her name and then he said, “Yes ma’am. I’ll do it,” in about four seconds, the way he always does.
Then he handed me the phone and went back out and finished the yard.
We got to the church at Sesser twenty minutes early because Lloyd is twenty minutes early to everything, and he said go on in, and I went in and got a seat and then remembered my glasses and went back out to the lot.
He was in the truck with the window down and a note card in his hand.
He was saying it out loud. He got to a place and stopped and shook his head one time and went back to the top and started over. I stood at the tailgate where he could not see me and he did that four times. The third time his voice came apart on the same word and he sat there a second and then went back to the top of the card again.
I have been to a great many funerals with my husband. I had never in my life seen him hold a note card.
I got my glasses out of the seat pocket. He never looked up. I went back inside and sat down and said nothing whatever about it, then or for two years.
Then he came in at ten till and he was Lloyd. He put his hand on Kelby’s mother’s shoulder and said her name at the front of the sentence, and he talked for nine minutes with not one thing in his hands, and he told the thing about Kelby cutting his own name into a piece of scrap the first week and how it was the worst weld anybody had ever done, and he got a laugh out of that room. Out of that room, in August, over that boy.
Afterward, in the fellowship hall, three separate people told me my husband had a gift. One of them was a man I have known forty years who put his hand on my arm to say it.
“He’s got a gift, Delores.”
“He does,” I said.
The Word Nobody Has
I went to a queen rearing short course at the extension in March of 2024 and Lavada Penrod sat by me at lunch. She keeps bees over past Vienna and I had met her twice.
I do not know how we got onto it. I gave her the propane man, because the propane man is my opener, and I gave her about ninety seconds of the rest of it, and Lavada put her fork down.
“You’re married to an ENFJ,” she said.
“A what.”
She wrote it on the back of a handout and slid it over. Then she said, “Does he do it to strangers when there’s nothing in it. Like at a gas pump.”
I said he did.
“Does he leave a room before he has to.”
I sat there with a plastic fork.
“My daddy,” Lavada said, and picked her tray up, and that was the entire conversation.
I did not like it. I want that in. Somebody putting four letters on thirty-one years felt like being handed a fortune cookie about my own life, and I said so to myself in the truck for an hour.
In February the bees are shut down and there is not one thing to do out there but wait and read, so I read.
I go into a hive for one frame. That is how you are supposed to do it. You do not open a box and look at everything, because every minute that lid is off costs the colony heat and temper, so you decide what you are going in for and you get it and you close up. I read the same way. I was going in for one thing, which was whether there was anything in it, and I will say what stopped me, since no paragraph about my husband did it.
It was the caution. Open the same hive a fortnight apart and you will write down two different colonies, and every beekeeper alive knows it, and the caution said as much about this. There is one retest worth quoting. A month between sittings, better than four hundred people, and around two in every three had all their letters hold, while upward of one in every four lost a letter inside those weeks. What sits under a letter is a sliding scale, and the letter is that scale with a line ruled across it, so the people standing on the rule fall to one side in the spring and the other side in the fall. A name, then, and not a finding. I decided a name was worth the having and kept going.
Under the letters sit four habits of mind in a rank, the top one turning over all day with nobody starting it and the bottom one wanting a shovel, and what that rank looks like for this type, and the bill the bottom of it runs up across thirty years, gets handled where the type itself is written up.
The first habit is the state of a room, read without stopping and then moved. That is the part I had. Where I was wrong is that I had it as reading only, a man taking the temperature and then deciding what to do with what he found, when the reading and the moving are one motion and there is no gap in the middle where a decision would go.
The second habit is a picture. One picture, of what a particular person is going to turn into, and no steps come attached to it, and he could not show you how he arrived. Ninety seconds with a seventeen-year-old and he has it.
Set those two side by side and you have the whole of my husband. He sees, fast, one thing a person could become. Then the first habit goes to work moving them at it. The moves are real and they are learned and he practiced them for forty years, and I was right about every bit of that, and being learned does not make a thing counterfeit. I learned to hear a queenless hive. Nobody has ever called that a trick.
They are thin on the ground. Go by that 1998 national sample of a little over three thousand people, and you get about one man in sixty carrying this type, one woman in thirty, and I married the one.
It went over on me in the honey house that month, in an order nobody consulted me about.
Move Three at my own table, and a man with no guard up. The habit points out. There is no version of it that turns and looks at him. Nobody has ever run the third one on Lloyd Kestler in his life because he is the one who runs it, and I found the door open and went through it to get my way about a capital campaign.
Then the twenty minutes in the truck at Sesser. Four times through a note card. It is not a gift and it was never a gift, it is a thing he has practiced until it looks like weather, and he pays for it in a parking lot where nobody is allowed to see.
And then the one that took me the longest, which is where they all went. Forty years of them, and they leave. I had that as proof: a project closes and the man moves on, and if any of them had been people to him he would have kept one. What is actually in that second habit is a picture of a person arriving somewhere. It is not a picture of them staying. So he ships them, every time, and he does it on purpose, and then he stands in the driveway.
Where They Went
I was hard to live with for about eight months and it did not go anywhere useful.
What it amounted to was that I could not tell him, and could not quit being angry that he had no idea. In June I told him he had spent his whole life making people and never once made anything he got to keep, which is a cruel thing dressed as a sad thing, and he said, “That’s not the worst way to spend a life, Delores,” and got up and went on out to the shop, and I sat there and hated myself in my own kitchen.
I have never told my husband what I said at Speer’s. Eight years. I have gotten close twice.
And Tori Absher. I have been at that from all sides and cannot get it anywhere it stops being mine. I know what her aunt told me and I know what a booth in that building sounds like from two booths over. She had two years of a man telling her she was going to be a nurse and she had one night of Lloyd Kestler’s wife explaining to a room that he does that to everybody. Mine was shorter and mine was funnier and it was the one that fit what she already believed about herself.
Now the difficult part, since writing of this kind gets taken up by readers who need it to mean something it does not. Knowing where a man’s warmth comes from does not settle whether it is being spent on you or spent at you, and there are men who read a room this well and use it to run a house, and from the porch you cannot tell them apart. Here is the only test I have. Say the move out loud, to his face, while he is doing it. Name it. If he goes red and clumsy and keeps at it worse than before, you have a person. If naming it turns into a forty-minute conversation about what is wrong with you for noticing, that is a different animal and no four letters have anything to do with it and nobody ought to be handing you any.
There are two here I have never got to the floor of.
I do not know whether Lloyd knows what I did at his sister’s table. He has never brought it up. He also has never once in thirty-one years brought up a thing that would embarrass either of us, so his silence is not evidence, and I have settled on not finding out, which I know what that is.
And I do not know that I cost that girl anything. Her aunt thinks so. Tori has never brought any of it up with me and is pleasant at the clinic. It is possible I am giving myself a larger part than I had, which would be a very familiar thing for a woman who spent thirty years as the only one in the county with the eyes.
In the spring I made a list.
I made it at the kitchen table across about two weeks, out of the yearbooks and the program’s old certificate files and my own memory, and I got to forty-one names before I quit, and I could have kept going. I put down where they are. Nineteen of them are out of this county. Three are dead. Denzil Karnes is in North Dakota. There is a woman in Tennessee who runs a shop with her name on the building. There is a man in Missouri I will come back to. Three of them are in prison and one of those three writes to my husband twice a year and Lloyd has an answer back inside a week every time.
Not one of the forty-one lives within twenty minutes of us.
I did not send anything to any of them and I have not shown the list to Lloyd. What I did with it was sit and look at it, which is the only honest thing I have done in this whole account.
Then there is Nolan.
Lloyd’s brother Nolan is sixty-six and has never held a job past nineteen months and has been angry at Lloyd since about 1974 for reasons neither of them will state. And my husband, who has moved this entire county, has run every single thing he has on that man for forty years. All three moves and some he made up. Christmas, birthdays, the hospital, the truck he bought him. None of it has ever worked one time and he has never adjusted and he will not quit, and not one line of what I read that February has anything whatever to say about it.
In November the phone rang on a Sunday afternoon. It was a man calling from a town in Missouri who came through the program in 2004 and had gotten himself into something with a business and needed to ask somebody.
I was in my kitchen with a dish towel and I could hear my husband in the front room.
“Well, now,” he said. Then he said the man’s name twice, front of the sentence both times. Then he said, “Tell me the whole thing and start further back than you think you need to.”
He was on that phone fifty minutes.
When he came in he put the phone on the counter and stood there a second, and I asked him who does that for him.
“Does what,” Lloyd said.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.