The Write Off

Chapter OnePork and Sauerkraut

On the first day of the year, Walt Brubaker ate three helpings of pork and sauerkraut at the Vera Crus fire hall and counted every one of them.

He did not mean to count. It was a thing that happened to him, the way some men hum. The first helping was for luck, because a pig roots forward and a chicken scratches backward, and every Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother from Kutztown to the Delaware knew which way you wanted to be going on New Year's Day. The second helping was because the first had been good. The third was because Grace had gone across the hall to talk to the fire company ladies and could not see him.

"That's three," said Freddie Hollenbach, across the folding table.

"I know it's three."

"I'm only saying. You had the look on your face. Like you were writing it down."

"I wasn't writing it down."

"You had your pencil out, Walter."

Walt looked down. He had his pencil out. He put it back in his shirt pocket, behind the other two, and picked up his fork.

The fire hall was full, as it was every New Year's Day from eleven until the sauerkraut ran out. The engines had been pulled out onto the apron to make room, and stood there in the cold with their chrome shining, and inside, under the banner that said VERA CRUS VOL. FIRE CO. EST. 1923, there were six long rows of tables with white paper on them and three hundred people eating as if it were their job. The kitchen pass through steamed. A radio in the kitchen was playing polkas. Bud Seip, the fire company president, was going up and down the rows with a coffee pot in each hand, refilling cups that were already full and telling everyone about the new engine he was going to buy as soon as somebody gave him seven hundred thousand dollars.

Across the table Freddie ate mashed potatoes and drank coffee, black, from a white mug with the fire company's emblem on it. He had a chip on the table beside his plate, a bronze coin a little bigger than a half dollar, and every now and then he turned it over with one finger without looking at it.

"Ninety five days," said Walt.

"Ninety five." Freddie turned the coin over again. "At the meeting they give you one at ninety, and then the next one's six months. It's got a triangle on it. Don't know what the triangle's for."

"It's very nice."

"It's a coin." But he put it back in his pocket, and never mentioned it again for the rest of the day.

It was a good place to be on the first of January. It was warm, for one thing, and it smelled of sauerkraut and coffee and the floor wax the auxiliary used, and nobody in it was going to ask Walt anything about the year that had just finished. He was grateful for that. It had been a long year.

In June he had retired. In July a man had died in a dunk tank, and Walt had found out that a woman his wife loved had been stealing from the carnival for sixteen years, and that his own ledgers had a hole in them that he had never seen. In the fall there had been two more. He had been, by Grace's count, involved in three murders in six months, which Grace said was more than most people managed in a lifetime and more than she would be putting up with in the next one.

Three weeks ago, on the ninth of December, Grace had gone into Room 4C at the county courthouse in Allentown, in the green sweater with the buttons, and sat in the second row on the left, where she had told Loretta Moyer she would sit. Walt had sat on the wooden bench in the hallway across from the door, as he had in September, and counted the benches. Seven. When Grace came out an hour and ten minutes later she sat down beside him, not close, with her purse on her lap, and said only, "She'll be at Muncy."

Loretta was seventy one. She would be a very old woman before she came home, if she came home.

They had driven home on Route 222 without the radio on. Since then Grace had said almost nothing about it. She had put up the tree, and baked the cutout cookies and the sand tarts, and sent the Christmas cards, including one to an address in Muncy that Walt saw on the envelope and did not mention, and on Christmas morning she had cried for a few minutes in the pantry, where she thought he could not hear her. He had stood in the hall and listened, with the coffee pot in his hand, and gone back into the kitchen and made a great deal of noise with the cups so she would know he was coming.

"Here's trouble," said Freddie, looking past him.

Walt turned around.

Tanner Ruth was coming across the fire hall with a plate in each hand. He was thirty four, tall, with a good haircut and a good coat and the kind of eyeglasses that cost more than Walt's first car, and he was coming between the long tables like a man crossing a creek on stones, watching his feet. One plate was piled with pork and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes. The other one was piled higher.

He came to a halt at the end of Walt's table.

"Mr. Brubaker," he said. "Happy New Year. I brought you a plate."

"I have a plate," said Walt.

"I brought you another one." Tanner set it down in front of him, on top of the one that was already there, and stood holding his own. "Is this seat taken?"

"Grace's," said Walt.

"Sit," said Freddie, at the same time, and Tanner sat, on the edge of Grace's folding chair, with his coat still on.

Walt had not always liked Tanner Ruth. Last summer he had sold Tanner his practice: forty one years of clients, three filing cabinets, a good front window on Main Street and his father's oak desk. Tanner had pronounced his name Bru Backer and moved the practice to a glass office on Hamilton Street in Allentown with a coffee machine that took plastic cups, and sold the oak desk to a man from Macungie who wanted to make it into a bar. The desk had come home, in the end. It was in the little room off the living room now, Kyle's old room, under the window, and Walt sat at it every morning. But he had not forgotten.

Then, in November, Tanner had come out to the VFW on a Saturday with a laptop and a box of new green ledgers and worked beside Walt for six hours at Mahlon Rohrbach's kitchen table, setting the post's books up right, and had not once looked at his phone. Walt had not known what to do with that. He still didn't.

Tanner was tired. There were gray smudges under his eyes, and his good coat had a coffee stain on the cuff, which in Walt's experience of Tanner was the equivalent of another man showing up in his pajamas.

"How's Allentown?" said Walt.

Tanner picked up his fork and put it down again.

"Allentown," he said, "is a very good market. With a lot of growth potential."

"I see."

"It's not working out," said Tanner.

Freddie stopped chewing.

"The clients don't come," said Tanner. He said it to his plate. "Your clients, Mr. Brubaker. The Vera Crus people. They won't drive to Hamilton Street. They won't park in a garage. They don't want to take an elevator to the third floor and sit on a gray couch and drink coffee out of a little plastic cup. I sent a letter to all of them in August with directions and a map and a coupon for the garage, and Mrs. Frey sent the map back to me with NO written on it in red pen."

"Agnes Frey," said Walt.

"She underlined it," said Tanner. "Twice."

"She would."

"And this year," said Tanner, and here he did look up, "this year everybody's heard about the new law. Last year nobody had. Last year the forms were late and half the clients didn't know to ask. This year they've all heard about it on the radio, and they all want it, and most of them want it wrong."

Walt had seen it. He had done one season under it himself, his last, the spring before he retired, with the forms late and the IRS changing its mind every other Tuesday. Congress had passed it in the summer of 2025, and it was, in Walt's private professional opinion, the most interesting thing to happen to a Form 1040 since he was a young man.

"The extra six thousand for anybody over sixty five," said Tanner. "And it phases out, so you have to work it for everybody near the line. That's half of Vera Crus, Mr. Brubaker. That's all of your clients."

"Our clients," said Walt.

"Then tips. Then overtime, but only the half, and half the W2s I've seen so far are wrong. Then the car loan interest." Tanner pointed his fork at Walt. "New car, built in this country, and you put the VIN on the return. The VIN, Mr. Brubaker."

Walt knew the rest without being told. Twenty five thousand on tips. Ten thousand on the car interest. Six thousand a head over sixty five, both spouses if they filed jointly, shrinking away above seventy five thousand, or a hundred and fifty for a couple. Every waitress at the diner. Every bartender at the post. Every widow on Church Street.

"I'm going to have two hundred people in my office asking me what a VIN is. Or not in my office. Because they won't come to my office."

He put the fork down.

"I have nine hundred returns," he said, "and one assistant, and she's twenty three, and she has never seen a shoebox."

There was a silence at the table. On the radio in the kitchen the polka ended and another one began, which in Walt's experience of the radio in the fire hall kitchen was the same polka.

"What are you asking me, Tanner?" said Walt.

Tanner took a breath.

"I've rented the Main Street office again," he said. "Your office. The old one. From the first of February to the fifteenth of April. The landlord gave it to me cheap because it's been empty since August and he's tired of the FOR RENT sign. I'll put the people from Vera Crus there. The ones who won't come to Allentown. I need someone at that desk. Three days a week. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Someone who knows them. Someone they trust. Someone who knows what to do when Mrs. Frey brings her taxes on index cards."

"In a recipe box," said Walt.

"In a recipe box," said Tanner. "Just for one season. I'll pay you. Whatever you think is fair. I'll put it in writing. Please."

Walt opened his mouth.

"Yes," said Grace.

She was standing behind Tanner's chair. Walt had not heard her come. Grace had taught first and second grade in Vera Crus for thirty two years, and she could cross a room full of seven year olds without a single one of them hearing her until she was standing right behind the one who had the gum. She had her coat over her arm and a plate of the fire company ladies' sand tarts in her other hand, and she was looking at Tanner Ruth with the expression she used for children who had finally asked for help they should have asked for in September.

Tanner stood up so fast he knocked the chair against the table.

"Mrs. Brubaker. I'm in your chair. I'm sorry."

"Sit down, Tanner. You're fine." She put the sand tarts on the table. "Yes. He'll do it."

"Grace," said Walt.

"He'll be there at seven," said Grace. "Every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Wednesdays too, once March comes and it gets bad. I'll drive him."

"I can drive myself."

"I know you can, Walter." She put her hand on his shoulder and kept it there. "I'll drive you anyway."

Tanner's eyes went from one of them to the other, like a man who had braced himself to push against a heavy door and found it open.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you, Mr. Brubaker. Mrs. Brubaker. I'll have the papers. I'll bring them to the house."

"Bring them Monday," said Grace. "Eat your pork."

Tanner sat down and ate his pork. Freddie put his mug down and studied the ceiling of the fire hall, where somebody long ago had hung a Christmas wreath from a rafter and nobody had ever been able to get it down.

They walked home at two o'clock, because the fire hall was on Main Street and Mill Road was only six blocks, and because the sun had come out and it was the first day of the year. It was cold, with the bright, still kind of cold that came after a snow, and there were still drifts along the curbs from Christmas week, gray now on top, with a crust that Grace broke with the toe of her boot every few steps out of an old habit.

They went down Main Street past Ritter's Pharmacy, which was closed, and across the street the diner, closed for the holiday, and next to it the old video store, which had been closed for ten years and had brown paper over its windows and a new sign leaning against the inside of the glass that said COMING SOON in red letters, with nothing after it. They passed Kemmerer's Hardware, which was closed for the holiday too, but there was a light on in the back. There was always a light on in the back at Kemmerer's. Erv Kemmerer had run the store since 1958, and Walt could not remember a day when there was not a light on in the back.

And then they came to the window.

It was a good window. Walt had always thought so. Plate glass, eight feet wide, with the door beside it and a brass mail slot in the door that he had polished himself every spring since 1985. For most of that time the glass had said, in gold leaf, W. BRUBAKER, ACCOUNTANT. TAX PREPARATION. BOOKKEEPING. A man had come from Reading in 1985 to put the gold leaf on, and it had taken him two days, and Walt had watched every minute. Then Tanner had scraped it off and put up white vinyl letters, and in August he had scraped those off too, and somebody had taped up a sign that said FOR RENT.

The FOR RENT sign was gone. Somebody had taken it down that morning. There was a clean square on the glass where the tape had been.

Walt stood on the sidewalk with his face to the glass.

The office was empty. There was the waiting room, with the hooks for coats and the radiator under the window. There was the doorway to the back room, where his desk had been. There was the light switch with the brass plate that had come loose years ago and that he had fixed with a single brass screw from Kemmerer's, which Erv had given him for nothing. All of it was there, and all of it was empty, and the winter sun came in through the glass and lay on the bare wooden floor in a long gold rectangle with Walt's own shadow in the middle of it.

Grace stood beside him.

"Three days a week," Walt said.

"Three days a week."

"February first to April fifteenth."

"I heard him."

"You said yes for me."

"I did." She put her arm through his. "You were going to say yes. You were going to say yes the moment he sat down. You'd have taken eleven minutes to do it, and asked him about the pay, and the hours, and whether he'd fixed the radiator, and then you'd have said yes. I saved us eleven minutes."

"The radiator," said Walt. "He hasn't fixed the radiator. Look at it. It's still got the dent."

Grace laughed. It was the first time she had laughed out loud since the ninth of December, and he heard it, and she heard him hear it, and neither of them said anything about it. They stood on the sidewalk in the cold in front of the empty window, with their two shadows on the floor inside it, until she squeezed his arm.

They went home by way of the elementary school, because Grace liked to see it on a holiday with nobody in it. Out on the ballfield behind the school, in the low sun, the fire company was putting down the skating rink it put down every January. Three of the juniors were dragging a hose off the truck. The Bieber boy, who was too old to be a junior and too tall to be anything else, had the nozzle, and walking beside him with one hand on his arm, showing him how slow to go, was Denny Wetzel from the hardware store, in his fire company coat with the hood down.

"Thin!" Denny called, when he saw them at the fence. "Thin, and let it set, and then another. You can't hurry ice, Mrs. B." He grinned across the field at Walt. "He's patient, this one. You wouldn't think it to look at him. I taught him."

The water went down in a long shining sheet over the brown grass and began, at the edges, to go white.

They walked on to Mill Road, where the Gehmans' dog came to the fence to bark at them as it had every day for eleven years, and the house was warm, and the oak desk was waiting under the window in the little room off the living room, with nothing on it at all.