The Guitar They Laughed At

I sat in my truck in that parking lot for forty-five minutes before I could make myself drive home and tell my son we had a problem.

Arvid, God love him, offered to sell his bike that week to help with rent. He’s fourteen and he tried to sound like a grown man saying it, and I told him no and then cried after he was asleep, because he was fourteen and already carrying weight that should have been mine alone to carry.

I applied everywhere in three counties. Grocery stores, the school cafeteria, two more plants that weren’t hiring. What I found instead, through a cousin of a woman I go to church with, was a housekeeping and cooking position with the Halloran family, five nights a week, cash money, no benefits, no questions asked about my age or my references. I took it the same afternoon I was offered it, because the mortgage doesn’t care how a person feels about scrubbing somebody else’s stovetop.

What Halloran Never Learned To See

Halloran made his money in cattle and oil leases, the way half the wealthy families in this part of Oklahoma did, off land his father and grandfather had held onto through droughts that broke other men. He was maybe fifty-five, silver at the temples, the kind of handsome that comes from good dentistry and better tailoring, and he had a way of talking to me that made every sentence feel like a small test I was expected to fail.

The first week I worked there, he found me dusting his study and caught me looking too long at a photograph on his wall, him shaking hands with some state official at a cattlemen’s banquet.

“Something interesting?” he’d asked, in that dry voice.

“Just admiring the frame,” I’d said, because I needed the job more than I needed to tell him the truth, which was that I recognized the county fairgrounds behind him in that photograph and had once stood in that same spot at fifteen years old, singing at that same fair, in a different life.

He didn’t ask what I meant. He never asked me anything real. To Halloran I was a category of person, not a person, and the fact that I had a name he rarely used was, I think, mostly an inconvenience to him.

Arvid, though. Arvid he treated like a nephew he was fond of, in that careless way rich men sometimes are with children who aren’t theirs to be responsible for. He let my son ride along when he checked fence, showed him how to back a stock trailer, talked to him about football like Arvid’s opinion mattered. My son lit up around him the way boys light up around any man who pays them a little attention, and I never had the heart to explain to Arvid why that attention cost me something every single time I watched it happen.

So when the fire department dinner came around and Halloran mentioned, almost in passing, that his cook would be helping in the kitchen that night, I said yes, because saying no to Halloran had never once worked out well for anyone who tried it.