My Boys Worked the Food Bank Line

Todd packed their box. I watched him do it. He put in a granola bar for each kid, because Wyatt had taped a note to the case in his nine-year-old handwriting that said one for every kid please.

“My mom used to bring me,” he said. Not to me exactly. To the box. “Not here. Over in Illinois. A church basement.

“I used to hate it. I used to hate everybody who worked the table, because I thought they were looking at us.”

I told him nobody here was looking at anybody. “I know that now,” he said. “I didn’t know that then. I was eleven.

“I thought every one of them went home and talked about us at supper.” He lifted the box across himself and held it out to the woman.

The heavy boxes were the hard part for me that day. They had frozen ham. Every time one came up, Todd lifted it across before I could reach for it.

At the end of the shift we stood out in the lot by our trucks. The sky was getting darker, and there was a little snow coming in off the river.

“What can you do?” he asked. “With the arm. What are the restrictions, exactly?” I told him. No lifting over my chest with the right.

No more than twenty pounds with it at all. Full use of the left. Everything else was fine.

I told him I could still read a dial indicator better than most men, and I could still align a shaft by feel.

He nodded slowly. “You know engines?” he asked. I told him I knew everything that turns. Pumps, gearboxes, drives. Engines were close enough.

“The marina down on the river,” he said. “We send our service work there. Their service manager is Ron Kessler, I’ve known him fifteen years.

“Winter’s when they do all the engine work, lower units, the boat lifts. He’s been short a man since Thanksgiving.”

“I already called him,” Todd said. “Thursday. I didn’t tell him your business. I told him I know a millwright with a bad arm and a good head.

“He said bring him by Monday at eight.” I told him he did not have to do that.

“Yes, I did,” Todd said. “I’m the one who called you a deadbeat to your kids. I had to do something with my hands about it.”

That was the first time I liked Todd Sloan. It was not the last, but it was the first, standing in that cold lot.

I went to the marina Monday at eight. Ron Kessler was a short, square man with grease ground into his knuckles for good, and he took me out into the heated shop where they had six boats up on stands, shrink-wrap peeled back, lower units off.

He handed me a boat lift motor that had been sitting on his bench for three weeks, because nobody could figure out why it was binding.

The gearbox shaft was out of alignment. A bearing had walked. It took me about forty minutes to find it and show him, and another hour to fix it, and I did all of it with my left hand and a flashlight wedged against my chest with my right.

“When can you start?” Ron asked. I told him today. He laughed, the first time I had heard him laugh. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“Bring your own coffee. We’ll figure the paperwork and your restrictions at the desk. Lifting is what the chain hoist is for.”