Paige Walked Her Paper Route Back

“It is not okay,” my mother said. She said it very gently, and it was the hardest thing I have ever heard her say. “Where is he?”

The front door of the ranch house was open. Melvin was standing in the doorway.

I do not know how long he had been there. He had on a flannel shirt and his work pants, the ones he wore to the truss plant for nineteen years, and he was holding a coffee cup in both hands. He is a large man, and he looked, standing there in the door frame, like someone had let the air out of him.

“Melvin,” my mother said. “There’s sixty-three notes.”

“Corinne.”

“There’s sixty-three, and Marcella says you told every one of them that this child quit.” She was holding herself very straight. “Marcella says you told them at the Kwik Trip. I thought you were on early shift.”

“Corinne, I was going to explain.”

“Then explain. Right here. Everyone’s listening.”

I want to be careful how I tell this part, because I do not want it to sound like a trial. Nobody raised a voice. A man in a doorway with a coffee cup said a few sentences, and a woman in a bathrobe listened with her face turned a little away.

“I got laid off in September,” Melvin said.

He said it to the coffee cup. “The seventeenth. Hartwell cut the second line. They gave six of us the paper in the break room on a Thursday and told us to clear out our lockers by five.”

“The seventeenth of September,” my mother said.

“I couldn’t tell you. You were working all that overtime, you were so tired. I thought I’d have something in a week, two weeks. I got up and went like always. I sat at the Kwik Trip. I put in applications at the feed mill and the lumberyard.” He swallowed. “When Paige got sick, I thought, I could do the route. It would give me somewhere to be.”

“And the money?” my mother said.

He did not answer right away.

“I was going to put it back,” he said. “I had gas to pay and the property tax, and I couldn’t ask you. And then I told Pete she quit, so I could keep the route, because I needed a reason to leave the house. I did not think it through.”

I stood by the Buick and listened to my stepfather say it, and I did not feel what I had expected to feel. I felt a distant, dry pity, the way you feel for a stranger on the side of the road.

And right next to the pity, exactly as large, I felt that it did not matter.

He took from a child who was lying in a dark room with a fever. He did it for more than a month, and then he lied about her in front of sixty-three houses to keep the lie alive.

“That is a reason,” my mother said, very quietly. “It isn’t a reason for that.”

“I know it.”

“How much?”

He looked at Paige. I think it was the first time he had looked at her all morning. He said, to her, in a voice I had never heard him use, “Four hundred and ten dollars, kiddo.”

“Four hundred and ten,” my mother said. “Today. Not Monday. Today.”