The Application My Father In Law Kept

The paper came across the tablecloth between the gravy boat and the cranberry dish, and my father-in-law kept two fingers on it until it stopped in front of my plate.

It was an application for employment. The plain kind that comes in a pad from the office supply store, with a line for your name and a line for your last three jobs.

Across the top, in Walt’s square handwriting, it said Walt’s Auto Sales, South Federal Avenue.

“What’s this?” I said.

“That’s a way out,” Walt said.

There were seven of us at his table that Thursday. Walt at the head, my mother-in-law Jean at the foot nearest the kitchen. My wife Kelly on my left. Kelly’s brother Josh across from me with his wife Amy. Jean’s sister Donna down at the end. The three kids were at the card table in the kitchen, where the kids in that family have always eaten.

Nobody had taken a bite of pie yet. Jean was still standing with the server in her hand.

“Walt,” she said. “Not today.”

“Today’s as good as any.” He did not look at her. He was looking at me, the way he looks at a trade-in he has already decided is worth less than the man thinks. “I’ve held my tongue for eleven years, Dan. I held it at the wedding. I held it when the babies came. I’m sixty-six years old and I’m done holding it.”

He took a pen out of his shirt pocket and clicked it and laid it on top of the paper. It was one of his lot pens. Blue, with the phone number down the side.

“A man who rides a garbage truck cannot provide for my daughter,” he said. “I don’t say it to be mean. I say it because it’s so. Fill that out. I’ll start you Monday on the floor, a draw against commission, and in a year you’ll thank me.”

The furnace kicked on. That was the only sound in the house.

What I did first was nothing.

I had done nothing for eleven years. Walt had been making some version of that speech since the night Kelly brought me home. He introduced me at the Elks as “Kelly’s husband, he’s with the city,” and let people think I sat at a desk. One Christmas he gave me a necktie and said, “For when you interview.” I laughed at that one. I thought you had to laugh.

I would have done nothing again. I had my hand flat on the tablecloth and I was already working out how to fold the paper and put it in my pocket and say, “I’ll think on it, Walt,” and eat my pie.

Then I looked up, and my daughter was standing in the kitchen doorway.

Emma was nine that fall. She had come in for another roll. She had it in her hand, and she was not eating it, and she was looking at her grandfather and then at me with her whole face open, the way a child looks when she is finding out where her father stands in a room.

That was the end of doing nothing.

I picked up his pen.

“Dan,” Kelly said, low.

“It’s all right,” I told her.

I printed my name on the first line. Daniel R. on the line, last name after it, the way the form wanted.

Position applied for. I left that one blank.

Present employer. I wrote City of Mason City, Sanitation Division.

How long. I wrote 14 years.