The Ticket She Marked Paid in Full

The Rest of It

We talked a long time that morning, the three of us in my little office with the door open, and the men at the counter pretending they were not listening, which they were.

Earl had told Mama the night before, after supper.

She had found the bank envelope on the seat of his truck, the second one that month, and asked him what it was, and he finally told her everything. He told her about my store too.

“I knew something was wrong for a year,” Mama said. “He’s been sleeping in the recliner. A man doesn’t sleep in a recliner for a year unless something is sitting on his chest.”

They had a plan already, the two of them, worked out at the kitchen table until two in the morning.

They would sell twenty of the older cows after weaning, keep the young ones, and put every dollar on the loan.

Mama was going to add a second refrigerator at the end of the driveway and raise more hens. She said it like she was announcing a war.

“And I’m not touching your ticket,” Earl said to me. “You marked it paid. I’m not going to insult you by trying to pay it. But I’m not charging another thing in this store as long as I live.”

“I know you’re not,” I said. “Because I’m not going to let you.”

Then I said the thing I had been thinking about since Tuesday, unloading that truck by myself with a pallet of mineral hanging in the air.

“Earl, the mill truck comes every Tuesday at seven. Twenty-some pallets. Mitch checks them in, and I run the forklift, and it takes us half the morning. I could use somebody.”

He looked at me like he did not understand.

“Fifteen dollars an hour,” I said. “It’s not much. It’s what we pay. Tuesday mornings, and whatever else comes in heavy. You’d be on the books like anybody else.”

“You’re offering me a job,” he said slowly.

“I’m offering you the forklift,” I said. “You taught me on it. I figure you can still drive one.”

He laughed then, a real laugh, wet and surprised, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “You still ride the brake,” he said. “I watched you through the window last Tuesday. You ride the brake going into the dock.”

“I do not.”

“You do,” Mama said. “I’ve seen it too.”

Tuesday

Earl showed up the next Tuesday at a quarter to seven, fifteen minutes before the mill truck. He brought a thermos of coffee and a pair of leather gloves so new they were still stiff.

Mitch shook his hand at the back door.

Mitch is not a talker, like I said, but he held on to Earl’s hand a second longer than he needed to, and that was a whole speech for Mitch.

I watched Earl climb up into the seat of our forklift. He sat there a minute, hands on the levers, the way you sit in a church you have not been to in a while.

Then he took the first pallet off that truck so slow and so square that Mitch looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.

Earl set it down without a sound and did not say a word about it.

He worked until eleven. He did not ride the brake once, and he made sure I noticed.

When we were done he sat on the dock with his thermos and his new gloves in his lap, and I sat down beside him.

“Your mama paid two hundred ninety-six dollars in egg money for my feed,” he said, looking out at the alley. “Do you know how many eggs that is?”

“Seventy-four dozen,” I said. I had figured it on Saturday night.

He shook his head. “Seventy-four dozen eggs. Thirty-six years, and that woman still finds ways to embarrass me into being a better man.”