The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

The counting

I did not say it loud. I said it the way you would say it to a clerk making change. But the store was quiet, and the old building carries sound.

“Forty.” Behind me a cup went down on the windowsill. I did not turn around. “Sixty.”

Dad looked down at the bills, and then at me, and then over my shoulder toward the coffee pot. His jaw was working.

“Eighty. One hundred.” I laid them in a neat row, edges touching, the way he taught me to lay out parts on a bench when I was twelve.

Everything where you can see it. Nothing hidden under anything else.

“One twenty. One forty. One sixty.” Edna said, “Garner, what on earth,” and somebody hushed her. “One eighty. Two hundred.”

I laid down the ten. “Two hundred ten.” Then the two ones, one at a time. “Two hundred eleven. Two hundred twelve.”

I put my hands flat on the counter on either side of the money and looked at my father.

Then I said it. I said it plain, not loud, the way you would read out a feed bill.

“Brody took two hundred and twelve dollars out of Dad’s pay for a short drawer on the seventeenth. Dad didn’t run that drawer. He was on the key machine. I’m covering the shortage myself, right here, so my father goes home today with his whole check.”

Nobody said anything. “He’s eighty years old,” I said.

“He’s been behind this counter every Saturday for fifteen years, and he has never been a dollar off. Not one. I wanted the people who drink coffee here to know that.”

Dad closed his eyes for a second. “Son,” he said. “I asked you.”

“You asked me not to make trouble for her,” I said. “I’m not. I’m not calling anybody names. I’m paying a bill.”

Brody

The office door opened. Brody came out with a clipboard in his hand and his store fleece zipped up to his chin.

He is a big young man, thick through the shoulders, with a short beard my daughter talked him into. He had a pencil behind his ear.

He saw me. He saw the money on the counter. He looked toward the coffee pot and saw Lavern sitting there with his cup on his knee.

His face went red, and then it went pale. “Garner,” he said. “Not here. Come in the office.” I told him I would rather stand here. “This is where you did it,” I said.

He said he did not do anything in here. “You did it in his check,” I said. “And his check is paid out of this store. To a man who works at this counter.”

Brody set the clipboard down on the end of the counter, carefully, like it might break. He looked at my father.

“Merritt,” he said, “you didn’t have to send him.” I told him Dad did not send me. “He asked me to stay home. I came anyway.”

Brody rubbed his face with both hands. He did not shout. I will give him that.

He is not a shouting man, and I am not either, and I think if either of us had been, it would have gone a lot worse.

“The policy is the closing clerk makes good on a short drawer,” he said. I told him Dad did not close. “He’s the senior man on Saturdays,” he said. “The drawer’s his responsibility.”