The Night My Son Called 911
Then I took a pan of chicken and noodles and a bag of ham and beans. It was the hardest thing I did that whole year, harder than watching the truck leave.
Linda closed the lid.
“There,” she said. “Now you owe Dorothy too.”
Tom caught me in the parking lot.
“Brenda’s brother runs the scale house at the co-op in Juniata,” he said. “Jeff. They’re in the thick of harvest, and the girl who did the tickets went back to college. He needs somebody who can add, show up at six, and not get rattled when forty trucks are lined up to the highway.”
“I work in a kitchen.”
“You have fed two kids on cut hours since August and kept that house like a pin. I’d say you can add.” He handed me a feed store receipt with a phone number on the back. “I didn’t tell him anything except that I’d met a woman who was organized. The rest is yours to tell or not. And you’d have to get the job yourself. He doesn’t hire as a favor. He fired his own nephew.”
That mattered to me more than I can say. I think he knew it did.
I called on Monday, on my break. I drove out Tuesday in my work shoes. Jeff was a thin man with a pencil behind his ear who did not smile once. He showed me the ticket book and let eleven trucks come across while he stood behind me with his arms folded.
I wrote eleven tickets. He checked every one.
He looked at the line of trucks and then at the clock.
“Seventeen an hour. Sixty hours a week till the corn’s in, then forty in the office if you work out. You’ll eat a lot of dust.”
I gave my notice at the care home that afternoon. Then I sat in the car in the co-op lot and did the arithmetic on the back of that feed store receipt. Seventeen an hour. Sixty hours.
For the first time since July, I was not one of the numbers that had to get smaller.
Harvest ran to the second week of November that year.
I weighed trucks from dark to dark. I learned every farmer in the west half of the county by his hat. A man named Dale, who hauled for his brother, started leaving a thermos of coffee on the scale house sill every morning and never once mentioned it.
That was how I learned it worked. Nobody in that town ever handed me anything straight on. They came at it sideways, so a person could take it standing up.
My first full check came the last Friday in October.
Then I drove into Hastings and bought ten pounds of hamburger, egg noodles, onions, and a new half gallon of vanilla. The good kind this time.
On Saturday I made hot dish. I made it the way my grandmother did, in the big roaster, and I filled three foil pans. One for our supper. Two with lids.
Mason stood on a chair and wrote the labels, because his printing was better than mine. Hamburger hot dish, feeds four. He drew a badge on one of them.
On Sunday I carried both pans down the church basement stairs myself. I lifted the lid with the masking tape on it and found room between the goulash and somebody’s ham loaf.
Linda was setting up tables on the far side of the room. She saw me. She did not come over or make anything of it. She just lifted her chin about half an inch, the way you would to somebody you had worked beside for years.