The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

Juddy leaned over to me at the table. “Did he just leave?”

“He just left,” I said.

Juddy shook his head slowly and took another bite of his ham bun. Nobody at our table said a word against Hobart. I want that to be clear.

Not one man said one word. We just sat there in that basement and ate, and after a while the women brought the bars, and we ate those too.

Here is the part I have thought about the most since, and I want to be fair to the man.

Hobart’s wife was named Odessa. She kept the books for Kvale Concrete for forty years from that same little paneled office.

She was the one who sent the Christmas cards and the graduation cards and the baby gifts. When somebody’s mother died, Odessa was the one who showed up at the door with a hotdish.

She died two years before Sully did, of a stroke, in the spring. Hobart came back to work three days after the funeral and never took another day off.

He hired a woman from Marshall to do the books part time. Nobody ever did the cards after that.

I don’t believe that man had ever bought a sympathy card in his life.

I believe Odessa bought them by the box and kept them in a drawer, and signed them both their names, and he never once had to think about what goes inside one.

That does not make the fifty dollars right. But I have come to think it makes it something other than cheap.

A man can be lost without being mean. I have been lost a time or two myself.

Sunday night after the funeral, Kyla called me at home. Jodi handed me the phone in the kitchen and went in the other room to give me some quiet.

“I need to ask you something,” Kyla said. “And you can say no.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m keeping the gift card,” she said. “I’m not proud. That’s diapers and milk and Wyatt’s cereal for a couple weeks, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t need it.”

“Nobody would ask you to,” I said.

“But I don’t want his fifty on my table, Lyndon.” Her voice was steady. She had thought about it. “Every time I walk past the counter I see it sitting there in that card. I don’t want it in my house. Would you take it back to him?”

I stood there in my kitchen with the phone cord wrapped around my hand. I knew what she was asking.

I knew it was not a small thing to walk into your boss’s office in October with fourteen men’s winter work riding on how that man felt about you.

“What do you want me to say to him?” I asked.

“Just that I kept the card,” she said. “And thank you for that part. That’s all. I don’t want to be ugly. Sully wouldn’t want me to be ugly.”

“I’ll take it in tomorrow,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. And then, very quietly, “He’d laugh at me. Making such a thing out of fifty dollars. He’d laugh.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” I said. “He’d be proud of you.”

Monday morning came in gray and cold, a real October morning with the sky low over the yard and the smell of frost on the gravel.

The mixer truck sat out front where Ivan had pulled it up, the drum turning slow.