The Password on the Shop Door

I was sitting at the front desk of Pickett Body and Paint at twenty to ten on a Tuesday night in February, finishing an insurance supplement for a Silverado, when my phone lit up on the blotter.

It was a Facebook notification. Wayne Pickett shared a post. My stepfather posts maybe twice a year, usually a picture of a Chevelle he restored or a note that the shop closes early for the county fair.

This was not a picture. It was three lines of plain text on his own page, where he has a little over eight hundred friends and about half of them bring their cars to him.

“Some of us work sixty hours a week and still come home to a 30 year old leech in the basement. Raised her and fed her, and now she wants a paycheck for it. Must be nice.”

I read it twice. Then I set the phone face down, finished typing the labor hours for the quarter panel, saved the file, and sent the supplement to the adjuster, because the customer needed that truck back by Friday.

That is the part people ask about later. Why I did not call him, or text him, or type something back under it where all eight hundred people could see. The honest answer is simpler than they expect.

There was nobody to call. An ugly post is not a crime. Nobody owed me a dime on paper, because I had never once been on the payroll.

I had been working for free for five years, and the only thing I could do about it was stop.

The basement room

I moved home at twenty-five, the spring my engagement to a man named Kyle ended about six weeks before the wedding.

The hall in Seymour was booked. The dress was hanging in my closet in a bag.

I was twenty-five with an apartment lease I could not cover alone and a job at a dental office that paid eleven dollars an hour.

My mother said come home. Wayne carried my mattress down the basement stairs himself.

Wayne married my mother when I was fourteen. My real dad left when I was six and sent birthday cards until I was ten.

Wayne was the one who taught me to drive a stick shift in the shop lot, and he never once made me feel like an extra.

So I want to say it plainly, before anything else. Wayne Pickett was not a cruel man for most of the years I knew him.

That is part of why the post hurt the way it did.

The basement room had a drop ceiling, a window well full of leaves, and a carpet my mother had picked in 2009.

I put up a shelf for my accounting books from Ivy Tech, where I had finished two years before the wedding planning swallowed everything.

That first summer, Wayne’s bookkeeper, a sweet woman named Donna who had done his books since the shop opened, retired to be near her grandkids in Ohio.

Wayne asked me at supper if I could cover the books for a few weeks.

A few weeks. I remember he said it exactly that way, with a fork in his hand, and I remember feeling useful for the first time since the dress went back to the store.

I quit the dental office in August. The shop was more hours than that job had been, and I told myself it was temporary, and I told myself a lot of things.