The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

Drawer shortage, $212.00. Net pay, $71.14. I read it twice. Then I set my cup down. “Dad. What is this.”

He took off his glasses and folded them. He took his time about it. Dad does everything slow and careful.

He was a machinist at the furniture plant for forty-one years, and he still measures twice before he so much as hangs a picture.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It got settled.” I asked him how it got settled, when they took two hundred and twelve dollars out of his check.

“The drawer came up short,” he said. “Back on the seventeenth. Somebody has to answer for a short drawer.” I asked him if he was the one who was short.

He looked at me then. Eighty years old, white hair combed straight back, the same pale blue eyes I see in the mirror.

“I have never been short a dollar in fifteen years,” he said. “Not one dollar. You know that.” I asked him, then, who ran the drawer.

He did not answer right away. He turned the coffee cup in a slow circle on the oilcloth.

“Kade ran the register that afternoon,” he said finally.

“I was on the key machine most of the day. The Hoffman boy needed six keys cut for his rentals, and then there was a man wanting a whole set of lock cylinders rekeyed. I was back there two hours.”

“So Kade closed out,” I said, and he nodded. I sat there and let that settle on me. Kade is sixteen. He is Brody’s son, from before Brody married my daughter.

He is a good-looking kid, tall and quiet, plays a little baseball, works the register at the store on Saturdays and two afternoons a week.

Brody is the manager of that store. Brody is thirty-two years old. And Brody is my son-in-law. “Dad,” I said. “Did Brody know Kade ran that drawer?”

“Brody does the schedule,” Dad said. I asked him if Brody had ever asked him about it, and he gave a short laugh with no fun in it.

“He came out of the office with the count sheet on the Monday and said the Saturday drawer was two hundred and twelve short, and the policy was the closing clerk makes it good. I said I didn’t close. He said I was the senior man on the floor and the drawer was my responsibility.”

Dad shrugged. “Then the check came.”

“That’s not a policy. That’s not even legal, Dad. They can’t take money out of your pay without you signing for it.”

“I don’t need you telling me the law, son,” he said. I told him somebody needed to tell Brody. Dad reached across the table and took hold of my wrist.

His hands are thin now, all knuckle and vein, but he can still grip like a vise. Forty-one years on a lathe does that.

“You listen to me,” he said.

“That boy is married to your girl. They’ve got a house payment and a baby coming in the spring. You go in there swinging and it’s her that pays for it. Not him. Her.”

I asked him if Brody just got to take it out of him instead. “I’m eighty,” he said. “I’ve got my Social Security and your mother’s pension. I’m not going to miss a meal.”

He squeezed harder. “Let it go, Garner. I’m asking you. Don’t make trouble for your girl.”

I looked at the stub. I looked at my father’s hand on my arm. “All right,” I said. He let go. He believed me.

I think that is the part that still bothers me, a little, that he believed me so easily. My father never could tell when I was lying. My mother always could.