The Detasseling Bonus My Daughter Earned

Curt’s machine shed

I drove to Curt’s place that evening after supper. I told myself it was to talk, and I believed it until I was sitting in the truck at the end of his lane with the engine off.

Curt and I are first cousins. Our mothers are sisters. When I was nine and he was eleven we built a raft out of fence posts and pallets and floated it down Wolf Creek until it came apart under us, and we walked home dripping, and neither of us ever told.

His mother, my Aunt Ellie, sat in the hospital with mine for a week when my mother had her hip done, and she brought a thermos of coffee every single morning.

He was in the machine shed with the big door rolled up, scraping dried mud off a disc blade with a putty knife. He saw me and kept working.

“Come to yell?” he said. “No.” “Good. Because I’m not changing it.”

“Tell me why,” I said. “Not the rule. Why.” He scraped for a while. Then he put the putty knife down on the workbench and wiped his hands on a rag, slowly, one finger at a time.

“You know what the company bills me when a field runs late?” he said. “Tell me.”

“Three fields went late the first week. I was short eleven kids on the bus. Eleven. Parents telling me at the last minute the kid had a ball tournament, or a cousin’s wedding, or went to the lake.

The company docks the crew boss three fifty a day per late field. That’s four thousand two hundred dollars, Jessica. It comes straight off what I get paid at the end.”

“So you took it out of the kids’ bonus.”

“I took it out of the kids who didn’t show up.”

“Piper was sick one day.” “Rules are rules.”

“Tanner missed two.”

“Lori got laid off in June,” he said at last, quieter. “The credit union. They closed the branch. And I signed a lease on the new bus in March, before any of that.

I’m four months behind on one thing and three on another. I am not a thief. I’m trying to keep this crew alive so there’s a crew next year for these kids.”

“I know that’s hard,” I said. “I do. But you read her name out loud in front of everybody, Curt, and you paid your own son.”

“Tanner’s different.” “How?”

“He’s mine.” That was the only honest sentence he said all night, and it was the one that settled me. Because I understood what he would say if I came back with a hard letter or a phone call to the company that night.

He would say I was trying to take down family over eleven hundred dollars.

He would tell the other parents. And Piper, who had asked me in the truck not to make a scene, would stand in that church lot on Friday for her first real payday with every eye in the crowd on her.

“If I come to you Friday and ask you to pay her,” I said, “will you?”

“I can’t float it.” “That is not what I asked.”

“Then no.” “All right,” I said. “Then I will ask you one more time on Friday, and that will be the last time.”

He picked up the putty knife again. “Sure,” he said. “Ask.”