The boots and the gloves
The company wrote to Curt in October. Marcy told me, because she thought I should hear it from her. The letter said the company would not be renewing his crew contract for the coming summer.
It said the company thanked him for twelve years of service. It did not say anything else, and it did not need to.
I felt sorry for him, and I did not feel sorry enough to be sorry about it. I should say what he did, because it counts.
Before the letter came, Curt repaid the company out of his own pocket, every dollar, in two payments. He and Lori sold the bus lease back to the dealer.
He took a job at the co-op elevator that fall, hauling grain, and by the first hard frost I was seeing his truck in the lot on the days I drove past.
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His mother, Aunt Ellie, called mine. They sat on the phone for an hour. I do not know what was said.
And Piper got her first real paycheck, and she did exactly what she had wanted. The week after payday she took Brad’s truck, with Brad in the passenger seat, to the music store in town. I stayed home.
When she came back she carried a used trombone case, scuffed brown, with a dented bell inside that she had paid for herself, counting out the bills on the counter.
She sat at the kitchen table and put the case in front of her and opened it, and she did not touch the horn. She just looked at it.
Then she took the second thing out of her backpack. It was a pair of boys’ work boots, size four, tan, with a good thick sole. Her little brother’s feet had been growing for a year.
“For Evan,” she said, and set them by the door. And then a third thing, out of the front pocket, in a plastic bag from the farm supply store.
She put it on the table in front of me without a word.
A pair of gloves. Brown cowhide, good leather, new. Size small. “Yours are Grandpa’s,” she said. “They’re too big for you. I measured them.”
I could not speak. I held the gloves in my hands, and I turned them over, and they smelled of tanned hide and the tin of the store. They fit like they had been made for me.
“Keep Grandpa’s on the nail,” she said. “They’ve earned it.” So I did. Brad drove a new nail beside the old one that night, and I hung my father’s cracked brown gloves on the left one, with the thumb he had mended with fishing line, and Piper’s new pair on the right.
They hang there side by side. Some mornings, going out to the truck, I put my hand flat against the old leather, as if it were a shoulder.