The Paycheck I Handed My Mother

I took my envelope at the window after Mom took hers. I watched her read the stub. And I watched her fold it and put it in her pocket like it was nothing, like she was going to make it work the way she always made things work.

Mom rents a little two-bedroom house on the east side of Arthur. Rent is $675, due on the fifteenth, and her landlord is a decent man but not a patient one. The fifteenth was Monday.

She had already spent money on gas that week, back and forth to Urbana. She had bought Mallory a breast pump the hospital did not supply and a stack of tiny gowns from the store in Champaign.

I knew without asking that three hundred and forty dollars short meant the rent was short.

Now, the first thing a sensible person says is, go to the office. Go over Vance’s head. Call the corporate number on the poster in the break room.

I thought about it. I had even looked at that poster before. But I knew how it worked at our plant. A complaint went to a woman in an office two hundred miles away, and she wrote back in three or four weeks.

Mom’s rent was due Monday. A complaint that took a month was not going to pay it. And Mom would never have let me make a family fight into a corporate file, not with Mom’s own cousin on the other end of it.

So I did the only thing that would work by Monday.

“Walk out with me,” I said.

We went out the side door together into the sun. The lot was full, rows of pickups and a few cars nosed up against the fence, and half the line was walking out to them, lunch coolers swinging.

My truck was parked near the back, facing the plant. I stopped at the back bumper. I don’t know why. I think I wanted something to lean on.

Then I took my own envelope out of my jacket. I had not opened it. I knew roughly what was in it, a little under nine hundred dollars after taxes, but I had not looked.

I held it out to her.

She looked at it, and then at me, and her face changed. My mother is not a woman who is easy to surprise.

“Cody, no.”

“Take it, Mom.”

“That’s your whole week.”

“Then it’s your week now.”

“You’ve got your own bills.”

“I’ve got a truck payment and a dog, and my wife works days at the clinic. We’re fine. I’ve got money put back. You don’t.”

She stood there a long time, looking up at me. I am six foot two, and she is barely five four, and she has had to look up at me since I was fifteen. She has never once looked small doing it.

Her hand shook a little when she reached for the envelope. I don’t think she was ashamed. I think she was tired, the kind of tired that comes from a week of driving and praying and sitting in a chair under fluorescent lights.

She held it against her chest with both hands.

I was aware, then, that we were not alone. Three men from the line had stopped walking. Norbert, who runs the edge bander and has worked there almost as long as Mom, and two of the younger guys from sanding.