The Paycheck I Handed My Mother

My mother opened her paycheck at the office window on a bright Friday afternoon in October, and I watched her face go still the way it does when she is adding something up twice.

She did not say anything at first. She just stood there in her faded blue work shirt with her name stitched on the patch, reading the stub, while the line of people behind her shuffled and waited.

Then she folded the stub along its crease and slid it into her shirt pocket, right under the patch, and stepped aside so the next man could get his envelope.

“It’s short,” she said to me, quiet, the way you would tell someone their shoe was untied.

“How short?”

“Three hundred and forty dollars.”

I did the math in my head before she could say it. Mom made $21.25 an hour after twenty-two years on the line. Two eight-hour days came to exactly three hundred and forty dollars.

The two days she had not been at the plant. The two days my sister’s baby almost did not make it.

I am Cody Wahlgren. I was thirty-four that fall, a line worker at the same cabinet plant outside Arthur, Illinois, where my mother had worked since I was in grade school.

We built kitchen and bathroom cabinets, mostly for builders in Indianapolis and St. Louis. Mom ran a station on final assembly. I ran one two stations down from her, close enough to see her most of the day.

Some sons would not want to work beside their mother. I never minded. She was the best hand on the floor, and everybody knew it, including the people who would not say so.

That included our foreman, Vance Ekdahl, who was fifty-five that year and had been married to Mom’s cousin for almost thirty years.

So Vance was family, sort of. He sat at our Thanksgiving table some years. He had carved a turkey in my grandmother’s kitchen. He had held me on his knee when I was little, or so they told me.

None of that was on his mind that week, and I need to tell you why, or the rest will not make sense.

My younger sister, Mallory, was twenty-eight and pregnant with her first. She was due in the second week of December. On a Sunday morning in early October, her water broke while she was making coffee.

She was thirty-one weeks along. Her husband drives over the road, and he was in Texas with a load of pipe. Mom drove Mallory to the hospital in Urbana, thirty-five miles, with the flashers on most of the way.

Arlo was born that afternoon. Three pounds even. He fit in my mother’s two hands, though she was not allowed to hold him for days.

They put him in an isolette in the neonatal unit, a clear plastic box with round portholes on the sides and wires running in and out of it like the back of a television.

Mom called me from the hallway that evening. She was not crying. She was talking in the flat, careful voice she used when Dad was sick, years ago, and I knew it was bad.

“He’s breathing on his own some,” she said. “They’ve got him on a little help. Mallory’s tore up. Her husband won’t be here till Tuesday at the earliest.”

“What do you need?”