The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

“I’ve got six hundred dollars,” she told me that night at the table. She said it flat, not like she wanted anything, just like she was reading it off a statement. “Six hundred and some change. The funeral home says a simple service with a burial is going to run nine thousand.”

“There’s no life insurance?” I asked.

“There was supposed to be. He was going to do it after the first of the year, when the truck was paid off.” She laughed, but it was not a laugh. “He said he’d do it after the truck.”

I sat there and I thought about all the things a person might think in that kitchen.

I thought about workers comp, and I knew before I even finished thinking it that the crash was on the drive home, and a commute does not count.

Minnesota does not make an employer pay anything when a man dies off the clock.

I thought about whether there was anybody to call, some office or some number, and there was not. Nobody had done anything against the law.

A boss does not owe anybody a funeral. Hobart had sent what he sent, and that was his business.

And I thought about the fourteen of us on that crew, men with house payments and kids in braces and wives working second jobs, and how the concrete season in southwest Minnesota ends when the ground freezes and the only steady work after that is snow removal for whoever kept on Hobart’s good side.

Nobody was going to quit over a sympathy card. Nobody was going to march into that office and say something they could not take back.

That is not how men like us are made, and it would not have put one dollar in Kyla’s hand anyway.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry about all of it.”

“I know you are,” Kyla said. “He loved you guys. He talked about that crew more than he talked about me sometimes.” She picked up the card and put it back in its envelope very carefully. “I just thought it would be more. Isn’t that awful? I just thought it would be more.”

The next morning at the shop I got there before anybody else.

The shop sits on the west edge of Marshall, a long steel building with a gravel yard out front where the mixer trucks park.

Hobart’s office is a little paneled room in the corner with one window looking out on the yard.

His light was on. It is always on. Hobart is sixty-seven and has been the first one in that building every morning for forty years.

I saw him through the window bent over his desk with his reading glasses down on his nose, and I did not go in.

Instead I went to the break room and found the big coffee can we used for the Christmas party fund.

I dumped the old quarters out into a cup, wrote Sully on a strip of duct tape, and stuck it on the side.

The men came in the way they always come in, one truck at a time, in hi-vis vests and Carhartt coats and boots still gray from yesterday.

Nobody had been talking much since Tuesday. Juddy had not said ten words all week.

When there were enough of them standing around the coffee pot, I cleared my throat.

I am not a speechmaker and everybody on that crew knows it, so they turned and looked at me like I was about to tell them somebody else had died.