The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

Lavern

Lavern Haupt walked up from the coffee pot. He walks slow now, with his knees, and it took him a while, and nobody filled the time.

He is seventy-four. He has run that store, or owned it, for most of my life.

He sold my father his first socket set and he sold me my first pocketknife, and when my mother died he closed the store for half a day so everybody could go to the funeral.

He came to the counter and looked down at the row of bills. Then he picked them up. All of them.

He squared them on the counter like a deck of cards, the twenties and the ten and the two ones, and he held them out to me.

“Put this back in your pocket, Garner,” he said. I started to tell him I would rather leave it. “I know what you’d rather,” he said. “Put it back in your pocket.”

He pushed the stack into my hand and closed my fingers over it. “This store doesn’t take money from a man’s son to pay a man’s wages. It never has.”

I put it back in my jacket. Lavern turned to Brody. “Is this right?” he said. “What the boy said.”

Brody looked at his son for a long moment. Then he nodded. “It’s right,” he said. Lavern asked him if he took two hundred and twelve out of Merritt’s pay for it.

“Yes, sir,” Brody said. Lavern asked him if Merritt signed anything, and Brody said, “No, sir.”

Lavern nodded slowly, like a man checking a measurement he already knew.

“You can’t take money out of a man’s pay in Indiana without he signs for it. You know that. I told you that the day I gave you the keys. I told you that about the shortages especially.”

“Yes, sir,” Brody said. Lavern told him to get the checkbook. Brody went into the office. We all stood there and waited.

Edna had come up from the coffee pot too, holding her sack of sunflower seed against her chest. Rudy stayed in his chair, but he had turned all the way around in it.

Brody came back with the big store checkbook, the green one with three checks to a page.

Lavern took a pen out of his coat and wrote the check himself, standing at the counter, his hand slow and careful.

Pay to the order of Merritt Tolle. Two hundred twelve and 00/100. He tore it off and laid it on the counter in front of my father, right where my twenties had been.

“Payroll correction,” Lavern said.

“Brody, you write it in the book that way. And you put a note in Merritt’s file that he was never short. Not that he paid it back. That he was never short.”

Brody said yes, sir. “Now,” Lavern said. “You’ve got something to say to this man.”