The Nights I Never Told Them About

The last week

The thirty-first of October that year fell on a Saturday. The bank closed at four on Fridays, so the real deadline was the thirtieth, and Hal had told me so in writing, twice.

By the Wednesday before, I had $70,920 in the account. I counted it on the back of a feed receipt in my truck at the plant at two in the morning, and then I counted it again.

I was $2,780 short.

Friday’s pay would come in, about $1,100, but not in time to count. A double on Thursday would help the following week, not that Friday. I had run it every way a man can run it.

So I had made up my mind what to do. I would put on my good shirt Friday morning, drive to the bank, and walk into Hal Brewster’s office and ask him for ten more days. I had never in my life asked anybody for anything. I don’t mean money. I mean anything. I had been lying awake for weeks working up to those words.

That Thursday night I wrote out my notice and handed it to Efrain to carry to the office, because I figured I would be done with that place either way. He read it standing right there.

“You are leaving,” he said.

“Friday is the day, whatever happens.”

He was quiet a while. Then he said, “You never took a vacation, Lyle.”

“I never had the time.”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.” He looked at me in a way I couldn’t read, and went back to his clipboard.

I took the double. Sixteen hours in the cold. By three the belt was a blur, and Dolores brought me a cup of coffee and said, “You look gray, honey,” and I told her I was fine.

At 4:41 I carried the last case of my last night to the pallet.

And you know the rest.

The phone

I have pieced the next hour together from what Darlene told me. She has told it three times now, and she tells it the same way every time.

At 4:52 the phone rang on her nightstand. It was Efrain. He had walked to the dock office while the paramedics worked on me and pulled the binder of emergency sheets. He found mine, one line filled in, in my square block printing, from my first week two years before.

Darlene Kincaid. And her cell number. And the word wife.

Nobody had called that number in two years. I never thought anyone would.

She picked up on the third ring and was already sitting up. She knew before he said a word, she told me, because nobody calls at 4:52 in the morning with good news.

“Mrs. Kincaid? My name is Efrain Salazar. I’m the lead on the night packout line at the plant. Your husband is conscious and breathing fine. The ambulance is taking him to Neosho. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

She sat with the phone against her ear.

“What plant?” she said.

There was a quiet on the line.

“Ma’am?”

“What line?” Darlene said. “My husband hauls cattle.”

She heard Efrain take a breath. “Ma’am,” he said, very carefully, like a man setting down something that might break, “your husband has worked for me every night for two years. Five nights a week. He has not missed one. I do not know any Carthage.”

She didn’t say anything for nearly a full minute, Efrain told me later. Then she said, “Which hospital?”

She called Brent first, because he lives closest. He was at the house in six minutes in his boxer shorts and a coat. They drove in the dark, and Darlene said not a word for the first nine miles.

Then Brent said, “Mom, what is it?”

And she said, “Your father has another job.”

She told me it was the only sentence she could find.