The Truck I Sold For Payroll

He asked me not to tell Carla. He asked me the way a drowning man grabs an arm.

“She’ll never look at me again,” he said. “Dale. Please. I’ll go to meetings. There’s the thing they have, the Gamblers, it’s over in Kirksville on Tuesdays, I looked it up, I swear I looked it up a month ago I just couldn’t walk in. I’ll go. Just don’t tell Carla. Let me fix it first and then tell her once it’s fixed.”

And that was the second time that day somebody asked me to put a thing off, to smooth a seam, to let a lie sit a little longer because the truth was too heavy for right now.

I was done putting things off. I had sold a truck that morning because the one thing you cannot put off is the people who are counting on you.

“No,” I said. “I’m not telling Carla. You are. Tonight, at our kitchen table, with me sitting right there beside you. Because she’s your sister and she loves you more than I do and this is hers to hear from your mouth, not mine. And then it’s going to be up to her, Shane. Not me. Her. What happens to you in this family is your sister’s to say, and I’m going to stand by whatever she decides.”

He looked at me like I had hit him, which in a way I had.

“She’ll put me out,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe she won’t. She’s a better person than both of us. But she gets to be the one to decide. I’m not going to take that off her to make it easier on you.”

Five o’clock

Marie cut the checks at four thirty off the cash, the same as any Friday, and at five she set them on the corner of the desk in the lobby the way she always did, four envelopes with four names.

Tboy took his and nodded at me and did not say a word, but he squeezed my shoulder once on his way out, hard, and I understood that he had known since seven minutes after eight that something was wrong and had decided to trust me to carry it, and the squeeze was him telling me I had carried it right.

Ricky took his and was out the door still talking. Junior took his and asked was I all right and I said tired and he let me have it.

Wade came last. He stood at the desk with his envelope in his hand and he did not open it, and he looked out the window at the empty place in the lot, and then he looked at me, and his chin was doing something it should not have been doing on a nineteen year old man.

“Boss,” he said. “I don’t need this. This week. I got a little put by. You take it back. Put it toward the truck.”