Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

“Here’s how I figure it,” I said. I kept my voice low. I wasn’t there to embarrass him, and I didn’t want Dale hearing more than he had to. “If you take this, the five thousand’s paid back. You lent it, you got it back. We don’t owe you a dime.”

“And the nights,” I said. “Four weeks of nights on your combine. Those aren’t payment for anything, then. They’re just a gift. From me to you. A gift’s a gift, Curt. Don’t you dare insult me by trying to pay it back.”

I heard him take a breath. He didn’t say anything. His jaw worked under the brim of his cap, and his eyes went shiny behind his glasses in the yard light, and he looked away from me the way he always looks away from things that hurt.

Right then, the back window of the pickup came down. I heard it before I saw it.

And then Jolie’s voice came across the elevator yard, high and clear over the last of the leg noise.

“Uncle Curt! Uncle Curt!”

Both kids were waving out the window in their pajamas, Jace with his whole arm and Jolie with her little hand opening and closing.

Amber was trying to hold the back of Jolie’s pajamas so she wouldn’t climb out.

Curtis looked over at them. And he lifted his hand and waved back, slow, like his arm was heavy. I saw him swallow.

“They wanted to see the last truck,” I said.

He looked at the money in my hand, then back at the kids. Then, finally, he took it.

He took it the way you’d take something you’d dropped and didn’t want back. His fingers closed on it and his hand just hung there at his side.

“Thank you for the work, Curt,” I said. “I mean that. I liked running your dad’s ground.”

Then I turned and walked to the pickup.

I made it about halfway across the yard before I heard his boots behind me on the gravel. He caught up to me by the front fender of the pickup and grabbed my shoulder.

“Brett. Take it back.” He was holding the money out now. “I can’t take this. Not from you. Not after I said that.”

“You can,” I said. “You did. It’s done.”

“Brett, I’m asking you.”

I turned around. He was standing there in the lights, holding out fifty hundred dollar bills, and I could see Dale’s face in the scale house window behind him, and another man, Ron from the office, standing in the office doorway with a coffee cup, both of them watching.

That was the worst of it for Curtis, I think. Not the money. Those men knew his dad.

Gene Moe never asked a man to work for free in his life, and every man in that elevator knew it.

“I won’t take it back,” I said, as gently as I knew how. “You keep it. You need it more than I do right now, and I know that. I’m not trying to shame you. I’m trying to make us right.”

He just stood there. I got in the pickup on the passenger side, and Amber looked at me, and she put the truck in gear.

Jolie waved one more time out the back window. Curtis lifted his hand again.

In the side mirror I watched him standing there by the scale house as we pulled out, getting smaller, with the money still in his hand and the dust going gold all around him under the lights.