The Sixteen Hundred Dollars at His Table

Ethan never once complained about getting up. He came home soaked and sore and smelling so strong I made him strip in the mudroom, and he ate like a combine. He was proud of himself. He told me how to set the nozzle and which way to work a pen so you weren’t washing dirt back onto clean concrete.

He told me Bryce was faster on the high walls but he was better at the feeders, because he had the patience to get every corner. He told me Uncle Doug said he had a good eye. I can’t tell you how often I heard “Uncle Doug said” that summer.

That’s what made the check so hard to look at. Ethan loved that man.

After supper Ethan went out to shoot baskets at the hoop on the machine shed. I could hear the ball hitting the backboard, slow and steady, the way it sounds when a boy is thinking.

I took my phone out on the porch and called Rob. He was outside Amarillo, parked at a fuel island, waiting on a load of boxed beef that was supposed to have been ready two hours earlier.

I told him everything. The check, the calendar, the hours, the math on the back of the electric bill. I read him the numbers twice, so he couldn’t tell me I’d got them wrong.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear a reefer unit running somewhere near him, and a man calling out a door number.

“He told me he’d take care of him,” Rob finally said. His voice was tight. “That’s what he said. Those exact words.”

“I know.”

“I’m nine hundred miles from home, Tina. I can call him right now and we can have it out on the phone, if that’s what you want.”

That was the obvious thing to do, and I thought hard about it, and then I said no.

I knew how that call would go. Doug would get hot, and Rob would get hot, and somewhere in it Doug would say the thing he was always going to say, which was that Ethan was just helping family. That family helps family. That nobody ever said a word about twelve dollars.

And then Rob would be stuck in a truck in Texas for eleven more days with his brother’s voice in his ear, and Ethan would hear about it secondhand, and what he’d learn is that his work was worth two dollars because nobody could make it worth more.

I didn’t want Ethan to hear his family lose an argument about him. I wanted him to see what his work was worth with his own eyes.

“What are you thinking?” Rob asked.

I told him. It took me about a minute. When I finished, he was quiet again, and then he laughed, one short laugh with no fun in it.

“That’s going to sting him,” he said.

“I’m not trying to make it sting. I’m trying to make it right.”

“I know you are.” I heard him let out his breath. “Whatever you do, I’m behind you. You tell Ethan his dad said he’s a good worker. You tell him I said that first.”

Saturday morning I was at the credit union in town when Kim unlocked the door at nine. Saturday hours are nine to noon, and I didn’t want to stand in line behind the whole county getting cash for the weekend.