The Detasseling Bonus My Daughter Earned

“Twenty of twenty,” Marcy said. “Seventeen escapes on the whole third count. You’d have to be a machine to do better.

I would hire you in a minute.”

“Thank you,” Piper said.

Marcy turned to me, and her voice changed. “Jessica. Piper is not the only one.”

“What?”

“I’ve been looking at the sheets since you called me. I pulled the whole crew’s paperwork at the office last night. Curt’s crew had forty-one kids. Six of them did not get the bonus on the list he read. Six.

Three of them missed one day or two for a wedding or a fever, and the other three, I can’t tell why.

Nothing in the sheets. The company wrote the bonus for all six. Eleven hundred apiece. Sixty-six hundred dollars.” She looked at the clipboard.

“Curt got the checks. Curt did not hand them out.”

“I have to report it. That’s a different job, and I have to do it Friday, in the office, with my supervisor, and it is not going to be pleasant.”

She paused. “I am handing out the company’s final audit letters at the payday lot on Friday at four. I do it every year. It’s part of the job.

Nobody thinks anything of it.”

“You would be there anyway.” “I would be there anyway,” she agreed. “Go home,” she said, “and wash those hands, Jessica. You’re getting blood on your father’s gloves.”

I looked down, and I was.

What Brad said

Brad came home Thursday night, a full day before his crew was released, because he had called his foreman from a motel parking lot in Missouri and asked if the poles could spare him. They could.

He drove six hours with the windows down and his boots on the passenger seat, and he came through the kitchen door at ten past ten with sawdust in his hair and a gas station sandwich in his hand.

“Where is he,” Brad said. “Home. In his shed, probably. And you are not going out there.”

“Jessica.”

“You are not going out there. Listen to me.” I took his hand, and I turned it over, and I showed him mine, the blisters taped and the raw heels of the palms.

“Piper asked me not to make a scene. She asked me in the truck.

This is her job, and her first one, and it is hers to finish. If you go out to Curt’s with that look, it stops being hers.

It becomes a family fight, and it will be about you and about him. Nobody will remember she walked eleven acres.”

He let out a breath, and his shoulders came down, slowly, like a man setting down something heavy. Then he did what he always does. He went down the hall and stood in the door of Piper’s room, and when she stirred and said “Dad?” in the dark, he said, “Go back to sleep,” and then he did not move for a long while.

In the morning she found him in the kitchen making eggs. She stood in the doorway in her sleep shirt and her hair in a knot.

And then, without saying a word, she crossed the room and put her face into his chest, and he put one big hand on the back of her head, and neither of them said anything at all.