The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

Kyla Moen slid the card across her kitchen table to me like it was something that might go off.

It was a plain sympathy card from the drugstore in Marshall, the kind with a little verse printed inside.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Open it. I already did. I just want somebody else to see it so I know I’m not crazy.”

I opened it. There was a fifty dollar bill folded once down the middle, and behind it a fifty dollar Walmart gift card still on its paper backing.

Under the printed verse, in blue ballpoint, it said Hobart. Nothing else.

I read the verse twice because I did not know what to do with my face. Something about the Lord being near to the brokenhearted.

I closed the card and set it down on the oilcloth and put my hand flat on top of it.

“That’s from the office,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say, because she knew exactly who it was from.

Hobart Kvale owned the outfit. Everybody in Lyon County who had ever poured a slab knew who Hobart was.

“It was in my mailbox when I got home today,” Kyla said. “Same day the funeral home called about the casket. They wanted to know what we’d decided. I told them I’d call them back. I haven’t called them back.”

Down the hall I could hear the boys breathing in their room, the little one with that snuffle he always had in the fall.

Wyatt was four and Colt was two. Sully used to say he named them like a man who watched too many westerns, and he was right.

My name is Lyndon Gerdes. I was forty that October, the foreman on Kvale Concrete’s flatwork crew, with a wife named Jodi and two kids of my own at the school in Marshall. I had been pouring concrete since I was nineteen years old.

Sully Moen had been on my crew for nine years. He came on at twenty-four, a skinny kid out of Tracy who could not run a bull float to save his life, and by the end of his second summer he was the best finisher I ever stood next to.

He died on a Tuesday night on the county road coming home from a double shift.

We had poured a machine shed floor out by Russell in the morning, and then Hobart had a commercial pad in town that had to go in before the weather turned, so Sully stayed for the second pour.

He left the job site a little before eleven. Two miles from his own driveway a deer came up out of the ditch, the way they do in October when the corn comes off and they have nowhere to hide.

He swerved, and the pickup went over in the ditch and rolled.

The sheriff’s deputy who found him said he was gone before anybody got there. I have told myself that a hundred times since.

I want it to be true so badly that I have quit asking whether it is.

Kyla was thirty and worked as an aide at the daycare in town. She made about what you would expect a daycare aide to make.

Sully made decent money for this part of the state, but decent money with two little boys and a rented house does not leave much sitting in a bank.