The Application My Father In Law Kept
Then there was the line that said Current pay. I wrote $71,400 and a city pension.
Under that it said Reason for leaving. I wrote one word. None.
I signed it at the bottom and dated it, and I turned the paper around so it faced him, and I slid it back between the gravy boat and the cranberries. I laid his pen on top of it the way he had.
Walt read it. I watched his eyes go down the page and stop.
“That’s not a real number,” he said.
“It’s last year’s W-2,” I said. “Fourteen years on the scale puts me a little over twenty-eight dollars an hour. The rest is overtime. Holiday weeks we run long, and when it snows the street department borrows every commercial license the city has, so I plow. The pension’s on top of that. I’ve paid into it every check since I was twenty-four.”
I did not raise my voice. I kept my voice down.
“I’m not telling you to show you up, Walt. I’m telling you because you asked on paper, and because Emma’s standing right there.”
Walt turned his head and saw her. Something went across his face that I had not seen on it before.
Then my wife put her fork down.
“It’s right, Dad,” Kelly said. “I do our taxes. Seventy-one thousand four hundred. Our house has nine years left on it. Ben’s ear tubes cost us forty dollars because of the city insurance. I have never once in eleven years wondered whether the lights would stay on.”
Her voice shook on the last part, and she let it.
“I should have said so a long time ago,” she said. “Dan asked me not to. He said a man’s paycheck was nobody’s business. But you put it on the table, so there it is.”
Nobody moved. Josh was studying his plate like there was something written on it.
I looked over at the doorway.
“Go on and get your roll buttered, honey,” I said to Emma. “Grandpa and I were just doing some paperwork.”
She went. I heard her tell her brother, in the loud whisper children think is quiet, “Daddy filled out a paper.”
Walt folded the application in half, and then in half again, and put it in his shirt pocket behind the pen.
“Jean,” he said, “is there coffee?”
“There’s coffee,” she said, and she cut the pie.
Nobody left. We ate pumpkin pie, and Donna talked about her knee, and at four o’clock we watched the Cowboys game with the sound down.
Walt did not speak to me again that day except to say, at the door, “Roads’ll be slick by the overpass.”
“I’ll watch it,” I said.
Kelly waited until both kids were asleep in the back seat.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“For eleven years of letting him. I kept thinking he’d wear out.”
“I’m the one who told you to leave it.”
“Why did you?”
I had to think about that, driving up Federal with the Christmas lights already on the poles downtown.
I grew up outside Rockwell, fourteen miles south. My dad worked second shift at the cement plant for thirty-one years. He had one rule about money, and he said it so often I can hear it in his voice. A man’s paycheck is between him, his wife and the Lord. He would no more have told a neighbor what he made than he would have taken off his shirt in church.