The Loft Above the Shop
While the foam man worked, Dad and I ran the wiring, and I saw Brody for the first time in two weeks. It was not my weekend, but he stopped by the shop on a Saturday afternoon between shifts, still wearing his store vest.
He looked up at the loft. The stairs weren’t in yet, and the foam man had plastic hung all over everything. You could not tell what it was going to be.
“What are you guys building?” he asked.
“Storage,” Dad said, before I could answer. “Your dad’s got too much junk.”
Brody laughed. “That’s true,” he said. Then he yawned so hard his jaw cracked, and I saw how thin he had gotten. He had always been skinny, but now there were hollows under his eyes that I did not like.
“You eating?” I asked.
“I eat at work,” he said. “Day-old donuts in the break room. They’re free.”
Dad looked at me over Brody’s head. He did not say anything. He did not have to.
“How many hours you working, bud?” I asked.
“Twenty-six this week,” he said. “I picked up a Sunday. Kurt says if I get ahead, I can save for a car.”
He has a truck. It is a 2006 Silverado with two hundred and forty thousand miles on it that Dad and I rebuilt the transmission on the summer he got his license. He does not need a car. He needs to be sixteen.
He left for his shift. I watched him back out of the yard, careful, both hands on the wheel, the way I taught him.
That Monday, I saw Kurt.
I wasn’t looking for him. I was at the co-op picking up hydraulic fluid for a customer’s tractor, and he was behind the counter in the seed office going over somebody’s spring order.
He saw me and came out. He is a big, square man with a crew cut and a firm handshake, and he looks you in the eye. I will give him that.
“Ryan,” he said, and shook my hand. “Brody says you’re building something out at the shop.”
“Storage,” I said.
He nodded. We stood there a second. There were two farmers at the counter, and the girl at the register, and I could feel everybody pretending not to listen.
I had a hundred things I could have said. I had been saying them in my head for three weeks. I said none of them. I asked him one thing, quiet, just between us.
“Brody tells me he’s paying you rent,” I said.
Kurt’s face did not change much, but something went still in it. “He is,” he said. “Two hundred a month. It’s below market.”
“Can I ask why?” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he told me, and I believe he told me the truth.
“My stepfather made me pay rent the day I turned sixteen,” he said. “Fifty dollars a month, 1995. I hated him for it.
“Then I left home at eighteen, and I knew how to budget, and I knew what a dollar was worth, and the guys I grew up with didn’t. I did fine. I think it made me a man.”
“Did he ever give it back?” I asked.
Kurt frowned. “Why would he?”
I didn’t have an answer that would not start a fight. I said, “Okay. Thanks for telling me.” I paid for my hydraulic fluid and left.
I sat in the truck in the co-op lot for a while afterward.