The Father In Law Who Faked It

The Fleet Contract

While all of that was souring at home, something else was quietly starting up on the other side of town, something that had nothing to do with Rodney at all, though it would end up tangled into everything that came after.

A man named Pratt runs equipment logistics for the farm co-op two towns over, the outfit that keeps half the county’s hay haulers and grain trucks moving during harvest season. I’d done a small favor for him the year before, diagnosing a fuel pump issue on his own personal truck at a gas station off the highway when his usual mechanic was out of town, and he’d remembered it.

He called me on a Tuesday, the same week Julia and I were barely speaking, and asked if I’d ever consider doing contract maintenance for the co-op’s fleet. Real invoiced work. Real hourly rate, more than I’d ever charged a customer walking into my own shop, because fleet accounts pay for reliability and Pratt had apparently decided I was reliable.

I told him I’d think about it, which was mostly true, but some part of me had already said yes the second the words left his mouth. Not because of any grudge against Rodney, at least not consciously. Just because it was the first time in longer than I wanted to admit that somebody had offered to pay me, in dollars, for exactly the same skill I’d been giving away every Saturday for five years.

I signed the contract two weeks later. It meant early mornings at the co-op yard, working on grain trucks and hay equipment that actually belonged to paying customers, coming home with a check instead of a plate of leftovers and a vague sense that I’d been useful. Julia didn’t say much about it either way at first. I think she assumed it was a hobby, a side thing, not a real shift in where my hands and my Saturdays were going to go from then on.

It was a real shift. I just hadn’t told her yet how real.