The Girl Who Read Him the Box Scores
She thought about it honestly. I could see her going back through the mornings.
“No sir,” she said. “Not once. I’d have seen. I do his floor.”
I went in and sat with my father.
“You’ve been out in that hall twenty minutes,” he said. “I know your boots.”
“I met Angie.”
“Good.” He had the paper in his lap still, both hands on it. “Did you behave?”
“I tried to pay her.”
“She won’t take it. I tried to give her a butterscotch once and she about called the sheriff.”
“Dad. Why didn’t you ever tell us about Helen? The kitchen floor.”
He was quiet. Outside his window a man on a mower was making the last pass of the season.
“What was there to tell,” he said. “The box was full.”
“You broke a door in.”
“I broke a pane of glass, and I paid for it too. Sixteen dollars at the lumberyard.” He turned his face toward me. “A route’s not paper, Mark. It’s four hundred and some people who are expecting you. You see the same box every day, you know when it’s wrong. That’s all the job ever was. Noticing.”
I took the statement out of my pocket and unfolded it, though he could not read it.
“There’s a line on your bill,” I said. “It’s been there since you moved in. I signed you up for it. Somebody was supposed to come sit with you every day, somebody paid. I thought that’s who was coming.”
“Nobody came.”
“I know that now.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred forty a month.”
My father whistled through his teeth. He was a federal employee for thirty-five years and he knows the value of a dollar to the cent.
“That’s a good deal more than a newspaper,” he said.
“Yes it is.”
“Are you going to go raise Cain in the office?”
“I thought about it all night.”
“And?”
“And I think if it’s on your bill, it’s on other bills. There’s a lady down the hall whose daughter drives in from Red Cloud. There’s Walt, his kids are in Omaha. If I go in that office by myself, I’ll get your money and an apology and that’ll be the end of it. The rest of them will go right on paying.”
Dad nodded slowly.
“The family council meets Thursday night,” I said. “It’s on the board by the dining room. I’ve never gone to one. I’ve always been ninety miles away on a Thursday.”
“And this Thursday?”
“This Thursday I’ll be here.”
He reached out and found my knee and gave it two pats, the way he used to when I had backed the grain truck up straight.
“You noticed the box was wrong,” he said. “Took you long enough.”
I worked Tuesday and Wednesday and half of Thursday. At one o’clock Jeff looked at the clock and said, “Go on, you’re no good to me anyway,” and I drove east with fourteen statements on the seat beside me.
Family council at Cottonwood Court meets the second Thursday of the month at six thirty, in the dining room, after the supper dishes are cleared. Somebody had set out about thirty folding chairs. There was a coffee urn and a plate of store cookies. I counted twenty-two people, most of them my age or a little older, most of them still in their work clothes. A man in a seed corn cap. Two sisters who looked alike. A woman in a bank blouse with her name tag still on.