I laid the first twenty-dollar bill on the wooden counter at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning and said the number out loud, the way you would count change back to a child.
“Twenty,” I said. My father stood on the other side of the counter in his red store vest, next to the key machine he had run every Saturday for fifteen years.
He looked down at the bill. Then he looked up at me.
“Garner,” he said. Just my name. It was the voice he used when I was nine and about to do something I could not take back.
I laid down the second bill. “Forty.” Behind me, by the front windows, the coffee regulars had gone quiet.
I heard a cup set down on the sill. The light came in long and pale across the floor, the way it does in November in southern Indiana.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“Sixty,” I said. I am not a man who makes scenes. I drive a propane truck for a living.
I have spent thirty years backing a bobtail up gravel lanes and talking to farm wives about their tank gauges. I do not raise my voice in a hardware store.
But I had a pay stub in my jacket pocket that said my eighty-year-old father had worked a whole month of Saturdays for seventy-one dollars and some change, and I had made up my mind on the drive in.
“Eighty,” I said. “One hundred.” To tell it right, I have to go back one day.
Friday
Friday afternoon I had Dad’s place on my route. He lives on a gravel road east of town, in the brick ranch house he and Mom built in 1971.
His tank is a 500-gallon, and I fill it myself, because I would not trust anybody else to check his regulator.
I pulled the truck up along the fence, ran the hose, and watched the gauge climb.
It was cold and bright, the kind of afternoon when the soybean stubble shines in the fields and you can hear a combine three farms over finishing up late corn.
When I was done I went in the back door, the way I always have. Dad does not lock it in the daytime.
I have told him to. He says a man who locks his door in Dubois County is a man with something to hide.
He was at the kitchen table with his reading glasses on and the radio low.
A hymn was playing on the Catholic station out of Jasper, one of the old German ones Mom used to hum while she ironed.
“Tank’s at eighty percent,” I said. “You’re good till after Christmas.” He told me to sit down, there was coffee on, the way he has told me every delivery day for thirty years.
I poured a cup and sat across from him. That is when I saw the envelope, and the stub lying on top of it, face up.
Dad is a tidy man. He does not leave paper lying around. He had been looking at it.
I did not mean to read it. But I am his son, and it was right there. Gross pay, $338.00.
Federal and state and county and Social Security taken out the way they always are. And then a line I had never seen on any pay stub in my life.