The Modest Salary She Mocked At Dinner
The town this happened in
I should tell you a little about where this all took place, because it matters to the story.
Our town is small enough that the feed store, the hardware store, and the diner all sit within sight of each other on the same two blocks of Main Street, and small enough that Hector’s jewelry counter has been run by the same family since before paved roads reached us. Friday nights in the fall belong to high school football. The whole town shows up at the stadium behind the school, packs the metal bleachers in coats too heavy for September and too light for November, and cheers for boys whose fathers they once cheered for on the same field twenty-five years earlier.
Sundays, when I am not grading papers at my kitchen table, I am usually at church, and afterward more often than not there is a potluck in the fellowship hall, folding tables lined with green bean casseroles and sheet cakes and somebody’s grandmother’s baked beans that everyone pretends is a secret recipe though we all know it is just brown sugar and bacon. The VFW hall down the road runs a fish fry every other Friday in the summer, and that is where Keith spent most of his boyhood day camps, learning to play horseshoes from men who had served in places I only knew from the news.
This is not a place people move to for opportunity. It is a place people stay in, or leave from, and Keith left, the way plenty of bright kids from towns like ours do, chasing a bigger paycheck and a bigger city an hour and a half up the highway. I never once resented him for going. I just noticed, once Paige entered the picture, how much translating I suddenly had to do between the world I raised him in and the one he was building for himself in Columbus.
What forty-one thousand dollars actually bought
People hear a teacher’s salary number and they picture a rounding error. A hobby income. Something a person does because her husband covers the real bills.
I never had a husband to cover anything. I had forty-one thousand dollars a year, give or take a small raise most years, and a boy who needed shoes that fit and a way to get to away football games and, eventually, a way to pay for college that did not start with a scholarship big enough to cover it outright.
That salary bought Keith’s cleats every August, always a half size up so they would still fit by December. It bought a used Ford pickup for his sixteenth birthday that took me four years of a separate envelope to save for, the same trick I still use, apparently, because it is the only trick I know. It paid down a chunk of his first semester at Ohio State, one hundred dollars at a time, mailed in with a note I always felt a little embarrassed writing.
It also paid the electric bill in July of the year Keith was eleven, though I did not think about that particular month very often anymore. I had put it somewhere in the back of my mind on purpose, the way you put away a photograph that still hurts to look at.
I will get to that month. Keith got to it before I did, that Sunday, standing at my kitchen table.