The Sixteen Hundred Dollars at His Table

“That’s my half,” he said. “It should have been all mine. It should never have come out of your mother’s furnace, and it should never have come out of Bryce’s pocket either.”

He turned to Bryce. “I’ll put your eight hundred back in your truck fund, son. Out of mine. That’s on me, not you.”

Bryce shook his head. “No, Dad.”

“Bryce.”

“No.” Bryce wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “I worked the same as him. I’ll get the truck a summer later. I don’t care.”

Doug looked at him a long time. Then he nodded, once, and put his hand on the back of his son’s neck, and left it there.

Doug pulled out the chair across from mine and sat down, heavy, the way a man sits at the end of a long day.

“Next June,” he said to Ethan. “If you’ll still come. Twelve dollars an hour, same as Bryce. I’m telling you the number now, before you ever pick up a wand. And I’ll tell it to your dad, too.”

Ethan looked at me. I didn’t say anything. It was his to answer.

“Yes sir,” Ethan said. “I’ll come.”

Then he did the thing that I still think about when I can’t sleep. He took the sixteen hundred dollars I’d counted into his hands, all eighty bills, and he held them out across the table to me.

“Mom,” he said, “you can have the furnace back now.”

I couldn’t say anything at all. I took the money and I put it back in the credit union envelope, and I had to do it slowly because I couldn’t see very well.

Lisa came around the table and put her arms around Ethan from behind, the way she used to when he was small enough to sit on her lap, and kissed the top of his sandy head.

“You’re a good boy,” she said. “You’re both good boys. I’m going to finish these pork chops now.”

We did eat. I wasn’t sure we would, but we did. Doug grilled the pork chops and burned two of them, and nobody said a word about it. Lisa’s potato salad was a little warm.

The boys ate on the back step with their plates on their knees, the way they have every summer since they were four, and I heard Bryce laugh at something Ethan said, and Ethan laugh back.

Doug and I sat at the table and didn’t say much. At one point he got up and got two cans of pop out of the refrigerator and set one in front of me without asking.

“Rob’s going to be mad,” he said.

“Rob’s going to be glad you said what you said,” I told him. “He’ll be mad for about a day. He’ll get over it. He’s your brother.”

Doug turned the can around in his hands. “I don’t know how I let it get to two dollars, Tina. It wasn’t like I sat down and decided. I just kept writing it smaller.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s how it usually goes.”

Rob called at nine that night from a truck stop in Oklahoma. Ethan answered on the first ring and told him the whole thing, start to finish, before I could get a word in.