The Envelope They Did Not Hand My Husband

Adam is a concrete finisher. He has been one since he was nineteen years old, which makes seventeen years of getting up at four in the morning in the summer so the pour is done before the heat ruins it. If you have never watched a man finish concrete, it is harder and prettier than you would think. He screeds it level, floats it with a big flat bull float on a long handle, waits on it, and then he gets down on kneeboards and works it by hand with a steel trowel until a wet gray slab looks like a piece of glass. The waiting is the skill. Too early and you tear it. Too late and you have lost it, and nobody gets a second try at concrete.

His knees are fifty years old. His hands crack open every winter from the lime. He comes home with his jeans stiff from the knee down, and I have a separate washer cycle just for him.

I am not complaining. I am telling you what the work is.

Garland Concrete works most Saturdays, because the weather takes back so many weekdays. A man can beg off a Saturday for a ball game or a wedding and nobody holds it against him. Most of them do, now and then.

Adam did not. Not once since the last picnic.

I know the number because of Ruby. Our daughter is seven, and last fall her teacher gave her a sheet of gold foil stars for reading. She decided, on her own, that the stars were for her daddy. Every Saturday he worked, she climbed up on a kitchen chair and stuck one on that day’s square on the propane company calendar by the refrigerator. When the calendar ran out in December she made me move the old one down and hang the new one above it so the stars would stay together.

Friday night before the picnic, she and I counted them for fun.

Forty-one.

“That’s a lot of Saturdays,” she said.

“That is a great many Saturdays,” I said.

The overtime from those Saturdays is how we got caught up after my hours were cut at the pharmacy in the winter. The bonus, the fifteen hundred Mr. Garland gives each man every August, already had a job waiting on it. Adam’s truck is a 2011 Silverado with two hundred and ten thousand miles on it, and it had started slipping out of third gear. The shop in Webb City wanted to look at the transmission. That is the kind of sentence that costs money just to say out loud.

So I had that fifteen hundred spent in my head. I will be honest about that.

Now, June.

In June the company was doing the footings and the slab for an addition on an elementary school, about twenty minutes east of us. Hoss was off that week. His wife was having her knee replaced in Springfield and he had not missed a day in years, so he took the week. That left Adam as lead man.

He came home that Wednesday at ten in the morning. He never comes home at ten in the morning.

I was off that day. He sat down at the kitchen table in his work clothes, which he also never does, and he put both hands flat on the table.

“I wouldn’t pour it,” he said.

“Pour what?”

“The school footing. Three trucks went back to the plant. Full.”

I did not know enough to know how bad that was. He told me.

They had the footing trenches dug and the steel tied the day before. It rained in the night. The engineer’s inspector, the one who has to sign off on the steel before any concrete goes in the ground on a job like that, came out at six in the morning and would not pass it. There was water standing in the northeast corner. The bottom of the trench was soft there, and the rebar had sunk down off its supports and was lying right in the mud. He wrote it up, wired a red tag to the steel, and said to call him when it was fixed.