Counting Out the Rest at Dad’s Table

Dad laid one ten-dollar bill in my son’s palm and closed Jasper’s fingers over it with his thumb, the way you would hand a child a quarter for the gumball machine.

Then he reached into the front pocket of his overalls, took out four twenties, and counted two of them into Reid’s hand and two into Corbin’s. He said each number out loud.

“Twenty. Forty. Twenty. Forty.”

Reid is sixteen and Corbin is fifteen. They are my sister Trina’s boys. Jasper is mine, and he was twelve that May, with a sunburn already starting across his nose and the backs of his arms.

All three of them had just come in off the same two acres. They had mowed the same grass, in the same heat, for the same three hours. The screen door had slapped shut behind them not five minutes before.

“Those two are going places,” Dad said, to nobody in particular. He nodded toward Reid and Corbin. “Boys going places need a little something in their pocket.”

Jasper did not say a word. He looked at the ten in his hand. Then he looked at me, the way a boy looks at his father when he is trying to work out whether something is fair or whether he has done something wrong.

I am going to tell this the way it happened, which means I have to tell you what I did not do first.

I did not argue. I did not ask Dad what he meant by it. I did not tell him he ought to be ashamed, and I did not take my boy by the arm and walk him out to the truck.

It was Dad’s money and Dad’s yard. Nobody sues his own father over a mowing wage, and nobody with any sense picks a fight in his daddy’s kitchen over thirty dollars. But I could make it right in front of him.

So I pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, the same oak table I ate every supper of my childhood at, and I sat down across from my father.

Dad’s straw hat sat crown up on the table beside his elbow, the way he has always set it down when he comes inside. It had a hole worn through the crown where his fingers took it off and put it on.

I took my wallet out of my back pocket. I had stopped at the bank in Cynthiana on Friday after my shift, so there were a few tens in it.

“Hold out your hand, bud,” I said.

Jasper held out his hand with Dad’s ten still lying flat on his palm. I laid a ten of my own on top of it.

“Twenty,” I said.

I laid down another one. “Thirty.”

And another. “Forty. Same as your cousins. Thank you for your work today.”

I said it plain. I did not look at Dad while I said it. I did not need to. I could feel him across the table, the way you can feel a storm sitting on the ridge before the wind turns.

Reid and Corbin stood by the screen door in their sweaty T-shirts. Corbin had grass clippings stuck in the hair on his arms. Neither one of them moved.

Dad did not say a thing. He picked up his sweet tea and drank some of it and set it back down in the same wet ring on the table.

“Go on and get a pop out of the fridge, all three of you,” he finally said. “It’s hot.”

That was all. That was the first Saturday.