The Pennies That Fed A Grade

The parts counter

I need to back up, because if I do not, you will think I did something to earn that trailer.

I ran the parts counter at Hale’s Auto for four years. If you have never worked a parts counter in a small town, it is more than handing a man a fan belt. It is knowing that Earl’s truck is a ’04 and not an ’06 no matter what he tells you, and knowing which fittings we stock and which ones take three days from the warehouse in the city, and keeping the old farmers from standing at the counter for an hour telling you about their hips while the phone rings off the hook.

I was good at it. I will say that plain because it matters. In four years I never shorted a drawer and I never sent a man home with the wrong part twice.

Mr. Hale owned the shop. He was maybe sixty, a widower, and he had the kind of face that looked like it had been left out in the weather. He was not a warm man. But for a long time he was fair, and in this county fair will carry you a good distance.

The trouble started slow, the way it does. First it was the raise he promised in the spring and then did not give, and when I asked he looked at me like I had tracked mud across his floor. Then it was the Saturdays. He wanted me there every Saturday, no extra pay, because the farmers came in on Saturdays and I was the one they trusted.

My husband Jeff drives a tanker route, four days out and three days home, and those Saturdays were the only mornings our family was all under one roof. I told Mr. Hale that. I said it kind.

“Everybody’s got something,” he said. “You want the job or you don’t.”

I wanted the job. So I worked the Saturdays, and I missed the pancakes Jeff made the kids, and I told myself it was for them.

The thing that decided it

What finally moved me was not the Saturdays. It was a Tuesday in September, and it was my own boy.

Dylan is eight. He is in the third grade at the grade school two miles from our house, the one Jeff and I both went to, the one with the flag that somebody takes down every evening by hand.

He came home that Tuesday and he was quiet in the way he gets when something is sitting wrong in him. I was still in my work shirt with the shop’s name over the pocket. I got him a glass of milk and I waited, because that is how you get it out of a boy, you wait.

“Mom,” he finally said, “does the lunch lady know we don’t have money?”

I set the milk down. “What do you mean, baby?”

“Pat gave me the cheese sandwich today,” he said. “The cold one. She said my account was behind. She was nice about it. But Tyler saw, and he told everybody at the table that I got the behind sandwich.”

I need to tell you about the behind sandwich, because if you do not have children in a school right now you might not know it is a real thing.