Logan had just gotten his probationary license, and he was saving for a 2006 Ford Ranger a man in Paoli had for thirty-five hundred dollars.
He had mowed lawns all summer and had about nineteen hundred saved.
He came over to ask Mike whether the co-op ever hired high school kids to clear brush. Mike said no, not at sixteen, the insurance would never allow it.
He made the honor roll in algebra and can do a column of numbers in his head faster than I can on the calculator.
Walt used to quiz him on change when he was six. “Customer gives you a twenty for a ten dollar bag. Go.”
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I said it before I had all the way thought it through.
“Come work the festival with me. Fifteen dollars an hour, all three days, cash. I need somebody to run the box.”
Logan’s face lit up like the Fourth of July. “Mom runs the box.”
“Not this year,” I said. “This year your mom stirs and you and I run the box. I’m worn out on that kettle.”
He did the math out loud before he left the kitchen. “Three days, about ten hours a day, that’s four hundred fifty dollars. Aunt Jolene, that’s a whole set of tires.”
He hugged me on the way out the door, which he had not done since he was about eleven.
When the screen door slapped shut behind him, Mike set his coffee cup down very carefully and looked at me across the counter for a long time without saying anything.
“Say it,” I said.
“You’re putting that boy in the middle.”
“I’m putting him at the table,” I said. “He’s good with a count, he needs a truck, and the box doesn’t leave the table if there’s two of us counting it. That’s all he’s going to know.”
Mike shook his head slowly. “One condition. You never say one word to that boy about his mother. Not now, not after, not if he asks you straight out. He finds out anything, it comes from her.”
“I promise,” I said, and I meant it. I would like to tell you that hiring Logan was all about his truck.
It was about half about his truck. I am not proud of the other half, but I am not going to hide it either.
I paid him out of my own half, not out of the stand money, and I made sure Tricia knew that.
I did not want her to be able to say she had been made to pay her own son to watch her.
I called Tricia the third week of September, on a Tuesday night after my afternoon route.
I had practiced it in the bus barn so many times that the mechanic asked me who I was talking to.
“Hey,” I said. “Couple of changes this year. I’m letting the Saturday shuttle go. Kim Hadley wants the hours. So I’ll be there all three days, start to close.”
There was a little silence on the line. “Oh,” Tricia said. “Well, good. That’s good.”
“And Logan asked for work, so I hired him to run the box with me. I’m paying him out of my half. I need you on the kettle this year. My shoulder’s been bothering me since spring.”
My shoulder had not bothered me a day in my life. That is the one outright lie in this whole story, and it was mine.