The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

The apology

Brody did not argue. I want that on the record. He could have. He could have said it was Saturday, it was busy, let’s do this in the office. He did not.

He walked around the end of the counter to where my father stood by the key machine.

He stood there in front of him, a big young man in a store fleece, with his hands at his sides.

“Merritt,” he said. “I was wrong. I knew it was Kade. I knew it that Monday. I didn’t want to fire my own boy, and I didn’t want people talking, and I put it on you because I knew you wouldn’t fight me.”

He swallowed. “That was a coward’s thing to do. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did it to you.”

My father looked at him. “I know why you did it,” Dad said. “I had a boy too.” Brody said that did not make it right.

“No,” Dad said. “It doesn’t. But it makes it something a man can forgive.” He put out his hand. Brody shook it.

I saw Brody’s eyes were wet, and I looked away, because a man should get to have that without his father-in-law watching.

Kade’s Saturdays

Lavern was not finished. “Kade,” he said. The boy straightened up and said yes, sir.

“You’re going to pay back the two hundred and twelve to the drawer. Out of your own check. I don’t care how long it takes.”

Kade said yes, sir. “And the next three Saturdays,” Lavern said, “you’re working the key machine with Merritt. Seven to noon. You’re not on the clock for those.”

Kade blinked. “For free?”

“For free. You’re going to stand next to this man and learn how to cut a key that turns the first time. And you’re going to watch how a man runs a counter for fifteen years without ever coming up a dollar short.”

Lavern looked at him over his glasses. “There’s nobody in this county better to learn it from.”

Kade looked at my father. “Is that all right with you, Merritt?” he said. “If I’m back there with you?”

Dad was quiet a second.

Then he took the blank he had been holding all this time, the one he had in his hand when I walked in, and he set it in the jaw of the key machine.

“Come here,” he said. “I’ll show you how to tighten the vise so it doesn’t walk.” Kade came around the end of the counter. And that was that.