The Paycheck I Handed My Mother

That was the best day of the whole thing. I think about it more than anything else that happened that fall.

On Monday I meant to go straight to Urbana. Mom had driven herself to work that morning, but she had left her sack lunch on the seat of my truck when I gave her a ride home from the hospital Sunday night.

So at a quarter past eleven, I drove it out to the plant. Lunch at our place is eleven thirty, and most of the line eats in their trucks when the weather is decent.

It was another clear day. Sun on the metal roof of the plant, the flag out front hanging straight down with no wind to move it. I parked in my usual spot and walked toward Mom’s car with her lunch in my hand.

Norbert was already standing beside her car.

That stopped me. Norbert is sixty-one, a widower, a deacon at his church, and he eats his lunch alone in his truck with the radio on the farm report every day of his life. He does not stand around in parking lots.

He had an envelope in his hand. A plain white one, the kind you mail a bill in.

Then one of the younger men from sanding came walking up behind him. I did not know him well. He was maybe twenty-five, with two little girls, and I knew he drove forty minutes each way from Tuscola. He had an envelope too.

The lunch whistle blew, and the side door opened, and Mom came out with the others, blinking in the sun. She saw me with her sack lunch, and then she saw Norbert, and she stopped walking.

“Roz,” Norbert said. He held the envelope out. “The boys and I took up a little something. It’s not much.”

“Norbert, I can’t take that.”

“Sure you can. You’ve brought a casserole to every funeral in this county for thirty years. You brought one when my wife passed. You can take an envelope.”

The younger man held his out too. “Me and a couple of the guys from my end. It’s for the baby. Gas money, or whatever.”

My mother stood there in the bright lot with her hands at her sides. I had never seen her not know what to do. She looked at me, as if I might tell her.

Then the side door banged open again, harder this time.

Vance came out into the sun, squinting. He had sawdust on his shoulders and on his eyebrows. He had been running my station all morning, and he looked like it.

He saw the envelopes. He saw Mom. He saw me.

And he started across the lot toward us.

I will tell you, I did not know what he was going to do. Part of me thought he was going to tell everybody to get back inside. Part of me thought he was going to say something about me, about the week I had taken, about family business in front of the line.

By the time he reached us, there were more people watching than I had counted. Men had stopped with their coolers half open. A woman from the paint line was standing beside her car with her door open.

Vance stopped about six feet from Mom. He looked at the envelopes in Norbert’s hand and the young man’s hand. He looked at Mom’s face.