The Fence She Finished in His Gloves

Paying the Boys

I paid Tanner and Wyatt that Friday. All of it, every hour for the two weeks, plus the week from September Rod had never paid them, plus a bonus I did not tell Brett about until later.

Wyatt looked at the check a long time. “This is more than we said.”

“It’s what you earned.”

He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket. “Brett going to need a crew next spring?”

“Brett and me both,” I said.

Tanner came by the hospital that weekend with his mom and a plate of cinnamon rolls.

He sat on the edge of the chair and told Brett about the clamp slipping and Wyatt diving into the grass, and he told it so funny that Brett laughed until a nurse came in to check his monitor.

Rod

I want to be fair to Rod, because Brett asked me to be.

His wife did take the house in the divorce. He did have a second mortgage he couldn’t carry.

He had been sleeping on his brother’s couch in Topeka since August, and none of us knew it, because he had come to work every single day and never said a word.

He was scared. He saw his partner lying on the gravel, and he did the arithmetic of his own life, and he decided the company was already dead.

He was wrong about that. But I do not think he was a monster.

That doesn’t mean there was no price for it. There was.

Out here, word travels by pickup and by sale barn and by church parking lot.

Once Hap Hensley made those calls, nobody in Chase County or the three counties around it was going to hire Rod Tillery to build a fence. Not that winter. Maybe not ever.

In December he came by the house one afternoon. He did not get out of his truck at first.

When he did, he walked up to the porch like a man walking up to a judge, and he stood at the bottom of the steps.

Brett was in the recliner by then, home from rehab, with a walker beside him. I let Rod in. He stood in the living room with his hat in his hands.

He signed his half of the partnership over to Brett at our kitchen table, on the same table where Brett had bid the Hensley job.

He did not ask for anything. He did not argue. He just signed it and set the pen down.

“I’m going to pay it back,” he said. “I don’t know when.”

Brett looked at him a long time. “I believe you’ll try,” he said.

Rod nodded. He did not look at me. Then he went out and drove away, and I sat at the kitchen table for a long time with the paper in front of me.