The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

“Then who closed out on the seventeenth, Brody?” He did not answer. I looked at him.

And I will tell you the truth, I knew the reason before he said a word. I had known it since the kitchen table.

He knew his boy took that money. He had known it since the Monday he ran the count.

And he could not bring himself to fire his own son, and he could not stand to have the whole town know his son was a thief. So he put it on the one man in the building who would never complain about it.

He put it on an eighty-year-old man who would rather go short than make trouble for his own granddaughter, a girl he loves.

That is a human reason. I understand a man wanting to protect his boy. I have a girl. I would walk into a fire for her.

But you do not do it by taking it out of somebody’s grandfather. “Brody,” I said, quieter. “I’m not here to fight you.”

He asked me what I wanted, then. “I want Dad’s check whole,” I said. “That’s all. The money’s on the counter.”

Dad laid his hand flat on the counter next to the bills. His fingers were not quite steady.

I looked at that hand. When I was small, Dad would bring me into this store on Saturday mornings for whatever the house needed, and Lavern’s father let him use the key machine.

He would take a blank off the hook and run it through the machine and hand me a brand-new brass key that did not open anything.

Just to watch me grin. I had a coffee can full of them under my bed until I was fifteen.

That hand. Behind me, I heard a chair scrape on the maple floor. Lavern was getting up.

Kade

Then the stockroom door swung all the way open. Kade came out wiping his hands on the canvas apron the store gives the stock help.

He had cardboard dust on his jeans and his ball cap on backward the way his dad tells him not to wear it in the store.

He stopped when he saw everyone looking at the counter. He looked at the money. He looked at his father, standing there with his hands hanging. He looked at my father.

I watched it go across his face. He was sixteen, and he was not stupid. He put it together in about two seconds.

Then he did something I will not forget as long as I live.

He walked straight up to the counter, right between me and his dad, and he stood next to my father by the key machine.

“I took it,” he said. His voice cracked on it, the way boys’ voices still do at sixteen sometimes.

He cleared his throat and said it again, louder, toward the coffee pot. “I took the two hundred and twelve. On the seventeenth. It was me. Not Merritt.”

Brody said, “Kade,” like a man stepping on a nail.

“I’m not letting him pay for it, Dad,” Kade said. He did not look at his father. He was looking at the floor, and his ears were red as a stop sign.

“I took it for gas. I’ve been driving down to Evansville every Sunday to see my mom since she moved. I didn’t want to ask you for it again. I was going to put it back out of my check. I just didn’t have it yet.”

The store was so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on in the back.

“I didn’t know they took it out of his pay,” Kade said, and now he looked at my father. “I swear I didn’t know that, Merritt. I would have said something.”

My father looked at that boy for a long time. Then he reached over and put his hand on Kade’s shoulder. He did not say anything. He just left it there.