The Counter That Moved Across the Highway

Ron Schaefer folded his hands on the desk the way my pastor does before a funeral. Then he told me that a mother of four was going to miss too much, and that he was sorry, but calving season did not wait for strep throat.

I was standing in his office at the back of Schaefer Feed and Supply with my coat still zipped. I had come in to ask if I could take Thursday afternoon for my ultrasound.

I had worked the counter at that store for eleven years. I started at nineteen, the summer after one semester of college in Dickinson, and I was thirty-one now, still making sixteen dollars an hour.

“You’re letting me go,” I said. I wanted to hear him say it plain.

“I’m letting you go.” He slid an envelope across the desk. “That’s two weeks. I wrote it out of my own account so it wouldn’t be short.”

Outside his office window the March wind was pushing snow across the lot in long white snakes. A pickup with a stock trailer idled by the dock, and somebody was hollering for the loader.

I knew whose pickup it was without looking. It was Kevin Bauer, and he was there for two sacks of high-magnesium mineral and a bag of colostrum replacer, because his heifers had started early.

“Ron,” I said, “I told you on Monday. It’s Wednesday.”

“I know when you told me.”

“I haven’t missed a day since Lily had the croup. That was two winters ago.”

He looked at the envelope instead of at me. “You’ll have four kids under ten. You’ll have doctor appointments and school programs and a baby up all night. I’ve seen it. I’m not saying it to be hard on you.”

“Then why are you saying it?”

He did not have an answer for that, or he did and would not give it to me. He just pushed the envelope another inch toward my side of the desk.

I did not yell. I have never been a yeller, and I was not going to start in front of the man who signed my checks for eleven years. I picked up the envelope and put it in my coat pocket.

“Who’s going to run the counter?” I asked.

“Kassidy’s starting Monday.”

Kassidy was his grand-niece. She was twenty and nice as pie and had never pulled a calf in her life. She did not know the Engens from the Olsons, or that the Wolf place ran Herefords and needed different mineral than the black cattle on the river bottom.

“Okay,” I said.

I walked out through the store. Kevin Bauer was at the counter, waiting, tapping his gloves on the glass. He looked at my face and stopped tapping.

“You all right, Britt?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and I rang him up, because he was standing there and his heifers were calving and Kassidy did not start until Monday. Two sacks of the high-mag, one colostrum, sixty-two cents short in his pocket, and I let it go like I always did.

Then I got in my car and sat in the lot with the heater going and my hand on my stomach. I was five months along. The baby kicked once, hard, as if she had an opinion too.