Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

“You’re sure,” I said.

“I’m sure. And Brett.” He looked at me straight. “You kept that machine running all fall. I’d have lost a week with that feeder chain if it was anybody else. I know what that’s worth. I should have said so at the scale.”

I put my hand out across the table. He shook it. His hand was warm this time.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll run it. For pay.”

After the roast, Curtis went in the living room and sat down on the floor, a forty year old man with bad knees, right in front of the television with the kids.

Jace climbed on him immediately to show him his toy combine, a little green one that had lost one wheel. Curtis turned it over in his big hands and looked at the axle.

“This is an easy fix,” he said. “Your dad could fix this in five minutes.”

“Dad can fix anything,” Jace said.

“That’s right,” Curtis said quietly. “He can.”

Jolie came and stood beside him and studied him the way she does, with her thumb in her mouth.

Then she climbed into his lap without asking and leaned back against his chest, like a chair.

“Uncle Curt,” she said around her thumb. “You waved.”

“I waved,” he said. “At the elevator. You were in your jammies.”

“Blue ones,” Jolie said.

“Blue ones,” Curtis said. And I watched my wife’s brother put his chin down on the top of my daughter’s head and close his eyes. He didn’t make a sound. His shoulders just moved a little, a couple times, and then they were still.

Gail stood in the kitchen doorway beside me, watching him. She put her hand on my arm, the pat-on-the-arm way, and left it there.

“His dad would have done the same thing you did,” she said to me, low. “Gene would have handed it back right there at the scale. That’s why it hit Curtis so hard. He saw his dad in you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything.

I just stood there with my mother-in-law’s hand on my arm. Before the video was over, both my kids were asleep on top of their uncle on the living room floor.

They left about five. Curtis carried Jolie out to the porch still sleeping and handed her to Amber, and he shook my hand one more time on the step, and he put his seed cap back on before he got to the pickup.

That night after the kids were down, I fixed the wheel on Jace’s toy combine at the kitchen table with a cotter pin and some needle nose pliers. It took four minutes. I’d tell Curtis it took five.

Amber was doing the dishes. She looked over her shoulder at me. “Are we okay,” she said. “You and him.”

“We’re better than okay,” I said. “We’re square.”

I set the little green combine back in the toy bin in the kids’ room.

Jace was asleep on his back with his mouth open. Jolie was asleep with her feet out of the blanket, blue pajamas, like always.

And on the dresser between their two beds, under the nightlight, Amber had set the two blue passbooks side by side, one for Jace and one for Jolie, with the gold stripes catching the light.