The Sixteen Hundred Dollars at His Table

He’d been in his room the whole time. The walls in that old farmhouse are thin, and the hall runs straight to the kitchen. He had heard every number I said.

He didn’t look at me. He walked straight to the table and stood across from Ethan.

“I cashed mine this morning,” he said. “Dad took me to the bank after chores. I put the rest in savings, but I kept nine hundred out.” He opened the envelope and took out a stack of bills, mostly twenties and some fifties. “I was going to buy a new phone.”

He started counting it out on the table. He wasn’t as smooth as Kim at the credit union. He had to lick his thumb.

“Bryce,” Doug said.

“Two hundred. Three hundred.” Bryce kept going. “Four fifty. Five hundred.”

“Son, put that away.”

“Six hundred. Seven. Eight hundred.” Bryce squared the stack and pushed it across the table toward Ethan. Then he looked up at his father, and his face was red all the way to his ears.

“We had the same hours, Dad,” he said. “It’s on the calendar. I wrote mine right under his.”

His voice was shaking worse than Ethan’s had, but he kept going.

“He did the feeders in barn two by himself because I was too lazy to get in the corners. You said so. You said he had a good eye.” Bryce swallowed. “Half of the difference is eight hundred. So now we’re even. Now we both got the same.”

There was a sound at the back door. Lisa came in with the ice, and she set both bags in the sink without a word, and then she stood next to the refrigerator with her arms at her sides and looked at her husband.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Doug looked at his wife, and then at his son, and then at his nephew holding sixteen hundred dollars of his aunt’s furnace money in both hands. And something in him came apart.

He took his cap off and held it. His hair was flat and wet with sweat underneath it. Without it on he looked older than forty-five, and tired, and like his little brother.

“I told myself it was fine,” he said. He said it to Ethan. “I told myself you were just a kid helping out, and Bryce needed the money, and you’d never know the difference. And when you came out every morning and did a man’s work, I told myself that again.”

Ethan didn’t say anything. He just sat there holding the money.

“That was wrong,” Doug said. “I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m sorry, Tina. I’m going to tell Rob I’m sorry when he gets home, to his face.”

He went across the kitchen to the little desk by the phone where Lisa keeps the bills. He got out the farm checkbook and wrote a check standing up, and he tore it out and brought it to the table.

He laid it down next to Bryce’s stack. It was made out to Ethan Kramer for eight hundred dollars. In the memo line he’d written “back pay.”