Thirty Years of Time Cards

What Stan said

Brower set his gavel down. “Stan,” he said. “I’m going to ask you once. Why did you do this?”

For a long time Stan did not answer. I watched him turn the folder over, and look at the table, and look at the faces in the room. He did not look at me. He looked, at last, at his mother.

Thelma had not said a word since we sat down. She was sitting very straight in her wool coat with both hands in her lap, and she was looking at her older son without any expression at all.

“I promised Brody the job,” Stan said.

His voice was small. It was nothing like the voice he used at the shop.

“At the Fourth of July. In front of Brenda. I said it’d be his by Christmas, and then Randall told me he was going to stay on past thirty, he liked the work, and I’d already said it.” He swallowed.

“I couldn’t take it back. I didn’t know how to take it back.”

“So you used the March day,” Brower said.

“I used the March day,” Stan said. “I knew it was wrong when I typed it. I knew it all weekend.”

“You knew you initialed that card,” Marcia Albers said, very quietly.

“I forgot,” Stan said. “God help me. I forgot I signed it.”

It did not change what he had done. I want to be clear about that. He had still taken a man’s keys and a man’s work and a man’s check, and he had done it in a text before sunrise because he could not stand to say sorry to his daughter’s husband.

The door

The last thing I expected was that my husband would come in.

I heard the door at the top of the stairs before I saw him. It was a slow step on the concrete, and I knew it by the little drag on the left foot where the grader pedal had worn a place into him over thirty years.

Randall came down the center aisle in his work jacket, and I saw that his eyes were red and that his hands, at his sides, were not quite steady. The room turned and watched him. Even Stan did.

“I couldn’t sit in the truck,” Randall said. He was talking to me, but he said it loud enough to carry. “I was sitting out there thinking about Alden’s face, and Merrill’s. And I couldn’t do it.”

Then he turned and looked at his brother. They had grown up in the same house and shared a bunk bed at nine and thirteen, and now they stood fifteen feet apart in a basement.

“I’d have given you the seat, Stan,” Randall said. “In January. I told you I’d go when I hit thirty. All you had to do was ask me. All you had to do was wait eleven weeks.”

Stan looked at the floor.

“That’s all I’ve got,” Randall said. “That’s it.” And he came and stood beside me with his hand against the small of my back, and I did not turn to look at him because I did not want to cry in front of the board.