The Envelope They Did Not Hand My Husband

It was a strange meal. Nobody talked about it. The men talked about a parking lot they had to pour in Carthage on Tuesday and whether it would rain. The wives talked about school supplies. Luis’s wife squeezed my hand under the table and did not say anything, and I had to look at the creek for a minute.

When we were loading the cooler into the truck, Hoss came across the lot. He leaned on the bed rail next to Adam, and for a while the two of them just looked at the trees.

“I should’ve asked what happened that week,” Hoss said. “I come back and Ray said you’d botched a pour schedule. I let it lay.”

“You had Sue’s knee to think about.”

“I had a mouth and a telephone.” He spat off to the side. “You be at the yard Monday like always. Quarter past five. Let me worry about Ray.”

“Hoss, if this costs those boys their jobs.”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

Hoss looked at him. “Son, I’ve worked for Ray Garland twenty-six years. He’s hardheaded and he’s tight and he’s been scared about money since the day I met him. He’s not a man who’ll put kids in a bad building once he’s had to look at it square. He just hadn’t had to look at it.” He glanced through the truck window at Ruby, who was buckling herself in with a blue tongue. “She made him look at it.”

On the drive home, Ruby was quiet until we passed the chat pile out on the county road. Then she said, from the back seat, “Daddy, did I get you in trouble?”

Adam’s hands tightened on the wheel. He pulled over. He put that slipping truck in park on the shoulder of a county road, turned clear around in his seat, and looked at her.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “You asked a true question. That’s never trouble at our house. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I should have had an answer for you. I didn’t. That’s on me, not you.”

She thought about that. “Mr. Garland looked sad.”

“I expect he was.”

“Should I say sorry?”

“No,” I said, before Adam could. “You should not.”

Sunday was long.

We went to church. I do not remember the sermon. I sat there doing arithmetic on the back of my bulletin with my eyes: rent, the electric, what the pharmacy pays me, how long we could go on that alone. Adam held the hymnal and did not sing.

That afternoon he cleaned his trowels at the kitchen sink, which he does when he is worried, and laid them out on a towel in a row. I dried.

“If he lets me go tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll find something. There’s always concrete.”

“I know it.”

“I’d still do it, Jenny. I’ve been asking myself all day. I’d still refuse that pour.”

“I know that too,” I said. “I would not have married the other fellow.”

He laughed, the first time since Saturday, and leaned his forehead against the cabinet door.

Monday morning I drove him. We had agreed the Silverado was not going to Carthage and back until somebody had looked at it, so that week I was hauling him to the yard at a quarter past five with Ruby asleep across the back seat of my car in her pajamas.