Counting Out the Rest at Dad’s Table

The Work

I should tell you who we are, so you understand what thirty dollars a week means at our house.

I am a lineman for the rural electric co-op that serves most of three counties around Cynthiana. I have climbed poles for twenty-one years. I have been out on storm duty on Christmas Eve, and I have been out in ice so thick the lines sang.

My wife Andrea works the front desk at the dentist’s office in town. We have one boy, a mortgage on a brick ranch house, and a pickup with two hundred and ten thousand miles on it. We do fine. We do not do extra.

Thirty dollars a week is a tank of gas in Andrea’s car, or the electric bill at the end of a tight month, or a pair of school shoes. It is real money. I want that understood. I was not counting out spare change.

Dad is Howard Ebner, and he was seventy-two that spring. He raised burley tobacco on that farm for forty years, until the buyout came through in 2004 and the price stopped being worth the backache. After that he ran a few head of cattle and leased out the bottom ground.

The house sits on a rise off a county blacktop, white clapboard with a tin roof and a long front porch. The yard around it runs two acres, maybe a little over, counting the strip along the fence row and the patch around the old stripping room.

Dad mowed it himself on his riding mower until this past spring. That March his doctor told him his heart was not what it used to be, and Trina and I agreed between us that the grandsons would take over the yard.

The boys worked it out between themselves the first week. One rode the mower over the open yard. One ran the push mower around the house, the garden, and the clothesline poles. One took the weed eater along the fence rows and around the stripping room.

They rotated every Saturday. Jasper rode the mower one week, ran the push mower the next, and ran the weed eater the week after. Nobody had an easy job for long. It took the three of them about three hours.

Forty dollars apiece for that is fair pay out here. It is better than fair, and I thought so the first time I heard Dad name the number to Reid and Corbin. I thought it was good of him.

I did not know until that first Saturday in May that the number was different for my son.