The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

I had on my gray hooded sweatshirt, the one I wear under my coat most of the fall.

It still had dried concrete on it from Friday’s pour, because Jodi had given up washing it after the third time that season.

I had the fifty in a small white envelope in my sweatshirt pocket.

Kyla had dropped it at our house on her way to the daycare that morning, folded in half, and I had put it in a clean envelope from Jodi’s desk because I did not want to hand him back his own card.

I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. I did not want an audience. I did not want it to be some kind of show.

I just wanted to do what Kyla asked me to do and get to work.

But a shop is a shop, and men notice things. When I walked across the floor toward the office, Juddy set his thermos down, and Pete stopped lacing his boot, and by the time I got to the office door I could feel them behind me.

Three of them came as far as the doorway. Juddy, Pete and Tanner. They did not come in.

They just stood there in the open door in their hi-vis and work boots, and nobody said one thing.

The rest of the crew was out in the yard, and I could see a couple of them through the window, standing by the mixer truck looking in.

Hobart was behind his desk. It is a gray metal desk older than I am, piled with invoices and delivery tickets and a coffee cup from the co-op.

He had his navy zip-up work jacket on, the one with the cuffs worn through, and his reading glasses down on his nose.

He looked up at me over the glasses. Then past me, at the men in the doorway. Then back at me.

I took the envelope out of my pocket and set it down on top of his invoices, square, the way you would set down something that belonged to somebody.

“Kyla asked me to bring this back,” I said. “She kept the card for groceries. She said to tell you thank you for that.”

That was all I said. I had practiced more in the truck on the way in, and I threw all of it out. There was nothing else that needed saying.

Hobart looked at the envelope. Then he picked it up and opened it, and he took out his own fifty dollar bill, still folded once down the middle the way he had folded it.

He held it for a long time. The furnace kicked on somewhere behind the paneling. Out in the yard the mixer drum turned and turned.

He looked past me again at the men in the doorway. I watched him look at each one of them, the way he had looked at our table in the church basement.

Juddy with his bad shoulder. Pete with his four girls. Tanner, who had put in his sixty dollars and apologized for it.

Then Hobart took off his reading glasses and set them down on the desk. He pushed his chair back, and he stood up.

I thought he was going to say something. I think every man in that doorway thought so.

I did not know if it was going to be angry or sorry or something else, and I braced for all three.