The Paycheck I Handed My Mother

They were not staring, exactly. They were just standing there between the trucks, the way men stand when they have walked into something and do not want to leave it in the middle.

Nobody said a word. Norbert took his cap off, scratched his head, and put it back on. That was all.

I told Mom to wait at the truck. Then I walked back across the lot and in through the side door to the office window.

Vance was still there, sitting behind the glass with his clipboard and the order board behind him, all that red.

“I need next week off,” I said.

He looked up. “You don’t have any vacation in.”

“I know it. Mark it unpaid.”

“Cody, I’m short already. That kitchen order ships the twenty-sixth.”

“I know when it ships.”

“Who’s going to run your station?”

“I guess you’ll figure that out.”

He set the clipboard down. “What do you need a week for?”

“To sit with my nephew. So Mom can come to work.”

I did not wait for him to answer. I was not angry, or I was, but it was the cold kind that makes you very calm. I just turned around and walked back out into the sun.

Mom was still standing at the tailgate with both envelopes in her hands. The three men had gone on to their trucks. Norbert lifted one hand to me as he pulled out, two fingers off the wheel, and I lifted mine back.

“What did you tell him?” Mom asked.

“That I’m taking next week. I’ll sit with Arlo days. You work. You can come over evenings and weekends.”

“You don’t know anything about babies.”

“I’ll learn.”

She laughed then, the first time all week, a short laugh that was mostly air. Then she put my envelope in her shirt pocket with her own stub and buttoned the pocket shut.

That night she called me, and she did not say thank you. She said, “Bring a sweatshirt. They keep it cold in there.” That is how my mother says thank you.

On Monday morning I drove to Urbana. The sun was up over the fields by the time I hit the interstate, and I remember the frost on the fence posts burning off in long white smoke.

I had never been inside a neonatal unit. I had pictured something like a regular hospital room, but it is not. It is a long, quiet place with low lights in one part and bright lights in another, and every bed is a little plastic world.

The first thing they teach you is the hand washing. There is a steel sink at the entrance with a foot pedal, and a sign that says three minutes, and a nurse who watches to make sure you do the full three.

Three minutes is a long time to wash your hands. You scrub under every nail. You scrub up past your wrists. I had a cut on my knuckle from a hinge jig, and the soap found it.

The nurse who watched me that first morning was named Sylvie. She was maybe fifty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and comfortable shoes, and she had been doing this job for twenty-some years.

“You’re the uncle,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Grandma said you’d be coming. She said you’d be big and quiet and you’d need a chair that holds you.”