The Counter Man the Town Kept

Tuesday

They let me go on a Tuesday, the thirteenth of October, at ten after two in the afternoon.

I had just finished mixing a gallon of barn red for a man painting a granary. The can was still warm from the shaker when Trent came out of the back office and said, “Harold, can I see you for a minute?”

He did not take me to the office. He took me to the break room, where somebody had already set a cardboard box on the table. My name was on it in marker, spelled right.

Trent had a page in his hand, and he held it with both hands, like a boy about to read at a school assembly. “Harold, the company has completed a review of staffing,” he read. “Your position has been identified as redundant, effective today.”

I sat down. I did not decide to. My legs did it.

“I have twenty-nine years and eleven months,” I said. “Do you know what happens on the third of November?”

He looked at the page, because the page was easier. “I was told this decision was final,” he said.

“That is not what I asked you.”

He did not answer. His ears had gone red. I said the number then, because I wanted somebody in that room to say it out loud, and it was going to have to be me. “Sixteen hundred and forty dollars a month. For the rest of my life. That is what you are standing in front of.”

“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said, and he meant it, which almost made it worse. “I have to walk you out.”

He did. A nineteen-year-old clerk named Dylan watched from the paint aisle and would not look at me. Trent carried the box down the main aisle, past the fasteners I had sorted by hand. There were three customers in the store.

One of them was Ruth Ann Dahl, who has driven a school bus in this county for thirty-four years. She was holding a package of light bulbs. She saw the box, and she saw the badge on Trent’s lanyard, and she saw my face, and she set the light bulbs back on the shelf where they did not belong.

I folded my apron and laid it across the end of Harlan’s counter, pale at the two worn places. At the door Trent held out his hand for my key card, and I gave it to him.

“I did not choose this,” he said, quietly, so only I could hear it.

“Somebody did,” I said, and I walked out into a parking lot where the wind was coming hard from the south.

I sat in my truck for an hour. I did not cry. I just sat with the box on the seat beside me: a coffee mug, a pair of reading glasses, a tape measure, and a photograph of Carla at her pinning ceremony. Twenty-nine years and eleven months fit in a box a clerk could carry with one arm.

Why I Did Not Sue

People ask me this, and I am going to answer it plainly, because the answer is not noble.

I went to a lawyer the Friday after. Ward Reinhardt, in Watertown, a decent man who had handled the title on our house. He read my handbook and the two-page plan, and then he sat back. “They will say the position was eliminated for business reasons,” he said. “Their lawyers are in Dallas and get paid whether they win or not. It would take a twelve thousand dollar retainer to start, and probably two years.”

I had $3,100 in savings. I also had a wife with a knee replacement scheduled for December, on insurance I had just lost, and a fifteen-year-old truck, and no way to say yes to a thing that size.

There was one more reason, and it embarrasses me. I did not want to spend two years standing in front of strangers proving I was not redundant. A man can only say that sentence so many times before he starts to believe it.

“I’d rather not,” I told Ward, and he said, “That’s your right. If something changes, call me. I mean that.”

I drove home with the radio off. Joyce was waiting on the porch, with a pot roast in the oven at one in the afternoon, which is how I knew Carla had called her. “What did the lawyer say?” she asked.

“He said we can’t afford to be right.”

She sat down next to me on the step and did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Well, Harold, we have never been able to afford much. We’ve always done fine.” That was the whole discussion. I will always love that woman for how short it was.