The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

Noon

At noon Lavern stood up from the coffee pot and said, “Well, I believe that’s the day,” which is what he has said at noon on Saturdays for fifty years.

Kade came out of the stockroom and turned the sign on the door. Brody ran the drawer out at the register, and Kade stood next to him and watched every bill get counted.

Brody counted it out loud. I do not think he meant anything by it. I think it was just how the morning had gone.

It came out even. To the penny. Dad hung his red vest on the hook by the time clock, the same hook he has hung it on since the year he turned sixty-five.

He folded Lavern’s check once and put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it.

Then he took his card out of the rack and fed it into the old clock, and it bit down with that hard clack I remember from when I was a boy.

“Same time next Saturday, Merritt?” Lavern said. “Seven o’clock,” Dad said. “Tell the boy not to be late.” From the counter, Kade said he would not be late.

Dad pulled on his coat. He looked at me. “You going to drive me home, or did you just come to count?”

I told him I would drive him home. We walked out into the November sun together, my father and me, and the bell rang over the door behind us.

That Sunday he went to Mass like always, and afterward he told me Kade had come to the early one too, with his dad, and sat three pews behind him.

Dad said he did not turn around. He said he did not need to.

Kade worked the next three Saturdays at the key machine for nothing.

On the third one, Dad let him cut a key for Edna’s back door all by himself, and it turned the first time.

My daughter had the baby in April, a girl, and Brody asked Dad to cut a plain brass key to hang on a ribbon over her crib. Dad cut it himself.

But that is a different Saturday. This one ended the way it ought to.

Dad clocked out at noon with his full check.