The Salary My Mother In Law Wanted

What Lyle Did for a Living

I met Lyle Hollis at a tractor pull in Platte County, which sounds like a joke and is the true story. I was at a client’s farm. He was at the parts trailer, a tall, quiet man with grease permanently in the creases of his knuckles, handing a farmer a hydraulic fitting and explaining which way to turn it so it would not strip. He was patient with the farmer. He was patient, afterward, with me, when I asked him where a person could get lunch on a day like that.

He was thirty-three. He had worked the parts and service counter at Brandt Farm and Fleet since he was nineteen. He knew every model of every tractor that had come through that county since 1985. Farmers drove forty miles past a closer dealership because Lyle would be at the counter and Lyle would find the part.

That was the man I fell in love with, and I want to be clear that I still believe that man exists. Lyle is good at his job in a way that cannot be taught and good with people in a way that costs him something. He is also a man who has never once in his life been asked what he wanted, and who answers every hard question the way he answered his mother’s: by studying the table.

Bonnie told everyone in Carver that her son was “in management at Brandt’s.” He was not in management. He was the best parts man in three counties and made forty-eight thousand dollars a year, and his mother had been telling his story a size too big for so long that Lyle had stopped correcting it. I think it had become easier to let her.

I knew none of that on my wedding day. On my wedding day I knew that Bonnie squeezed my hand in the receiving line so hard my ring cut into my finger, and said, “Welcome to the family, dear. We’ll take good care of you.”

I thought it was a lovely thing to say.