The Last Day on the Potato Digger

Lance

I watched my husband’s face. He had gone a dull red, all the way down his neck. He looked down at his hands on the paper tablecloth for what felt like a full minute.

Then he stood up, scraped his chair back on the concrete, and walked out the cellar door into the dark.

I heard the door of his truck open. I sat there with my heart pounding. I thought, well, that is it. He is going home. Or he is going somewhere. And I will deal with it tomorrow.

Bridger was still standing at the head of the table with the envelope. He was looking at the door too.

I could see on his face that he thought this was his fault. That was the one thing in the world I had been trying to keep from happening.

Then the truck door slammed, and Lance came back in.

He walked up the length of that table, past all forty people, past the Crock-Pots and the sheet cakes. He had a bank envelope in his hand, the long kind. He stopped in front of Bridger.

He had been paid in cash that week for rebuilding a loader for a man out by Basalt. Twelve hundred dollars. I found out later it had been sitting in his glove box, waiting to go on the snowmobile Monday.

He opened the envelope and counted it out right there into Bridger’s hand, in twenties and fifties, out loud, so everybody could hear. He stopped at eleven hundred and forty.

“That’s yours,” he said. His voice was rough. “That first one. That was yours too. I shouldn’t have taken it.”

Bridger stared at the money in his hand. “Lance, you don’t…”

“Yeah, I do,” Lance said.

He turned around to the room. I have been married to that man six years and I have never heard him say more than ten words in a row in front of more than three people. He stood in that cellar with his ears red and said it anyway.

“My dad took every harvest check I made from twelve years old until I left home,” he said. “Every one. Called it board. I grew up thinking that’s how you raise a boy. That’s what I was doing.”

He swallowed.

“And I was behind on that sled and too proud to tell my wife. So I took it out of the kid. That’s the truth of it. I’m not proud of it.”

Then he turned to Arlo.

“Arlo,” he said. “You still need anybody on the cellar crew on weekends? Running fans, sorting for the shed?”

Arlo looked at him for a long time. Then the corner of his mouth moved, which on Arlo is about the same as a big smile.

“Saturdays,” Arlo said. “Six in the morning. Bring your own coffee. Marjean’s isn’t any good.”

“Hey,” Marjean said from the end of the table, and the whole cellar laughed, and the air came back into the room.

The drive home

Bridger rode home with Lance. I did not plan that. When we walked out of the cellar, Bridger just went to Lance’s truck instead of mine, and Lance waited for him.

I followed them home on the county road in the dark, watching their taillights. I do not know what they said to each other. I have never asked. Some things belong to the people in the truck.

When I pulled into the driveway, they were both still sitting in the cab with the dome light on. Bridger had the envelope from Arlo in his lap. Lance had his hand on the back of the seat behind Bridger’s head.

I went in and ran a bath for my back and cried in it for about twenty minutes. Not sad crying. The other kind, the kind where something you were holding up by yourself for a month finally gets set down.

Later that night, in bed, Lance did not face the wall. He lay on his back looking at the ceiling.

“I should’ve told you about the payments,” he said. “I kept thinking the overtime would come back.”

“I know,” I said.

“I was ashamed,” he said. “And my dad was in my head the whole time. I could hear him. ‘Boys who eat at my table.’ That’s his line. I didn’t even know I was going to say it until I said it.”

“I know,” I said again.

He was quiet a while.

“It’s your table anyway,” he said. “It’s your house.”

“It’s our house,” I said. “It has been for six years.” And I meant it. I reached over and put my hand on his chest, and after a minute he put his hand on top of it.