The Sixteen Hundred Dollars at His Table

Ethan came in the back door on the last Friday of August smelling like the barns, and he had a check folded in the pocket of his faded gray t-shirt like it was something that might blow away.

He laid it on our kitchen table and smoothed it flat with both hands. “Uncle Doug paid us,” he said, and he was grinning the way he used to grin when he was six and caught his first bluegill.

I was standing at the stove browning hamburger for tacos. I wiped my hands on the towel and came over to look, because a boy’s first real paycheck is a thing a mother ought to look at properly.

It was made out to Ethan Kramer in Doug’s square handwriting. Three hundred twenty dollars and no cents. In the memo line he had written “summer help,” and underneath, signed his name the way he signs everything, all capital letters pressed hard into the paper.

“Well, look at you,” I said, and I meant it. Ethan had never had three hundred twenty dollars of his own in his life. He’d had birthday money and a jar of quarters, and that was it.

“I’m going to put it toward a calf,” he said. “For 4-H. Not this year, maybe. But I’m going to start a fund.”

I told him that was a fine idea. Then I went back to the hamburger, and he sat down at the table and kept looking at the check, and I thought that was the end of it.

It was about five minutes later that he said, very carefully, the way kids say things when they are not sure whether they are allowed to say them, “Mom, can I ask you something about money?”

“Sure, honey.”

“Bryce’s check was a lot bigger than mine.” He turned his over, like the back might explain it. “He showed me in the truck. His said one thousand nine hundred twenty.”

I turned the burner off. I didn’t decide to, my hand just did it.

“Maybe he worked more hours than you,” I said. I already knew he hadn’t. I had driven Ethan out to that farm nearly every morning of the summer, and Bryce had always been right there in the wash bay with him.

“No, we wrote our hours on the same calendar. In the office by the load-out. We both had a hundred and sixty. Uncle Doug said so when he gave us the checks.” Ethan looked up at me. “Is it because Bryce is older?”

Bryce was fourteen. Ethan was thirteen. Eleven months apart, cousins, and closer than most brothers I know.

I sat down across from my son and did the math in my head, and then I did it again on the back of the electric bill because I wanted to be sure. One thousand nine hundred twenty divided by one hundred sixty is twelve. Three hundred twenty divided by one hundred sixty is two.

Twelve dollars an hour for Doug’s boy. Two dollars an hour for mine. The same barns, the same hours, the same pressure washer, the same summer.

“Mom?” Ethan said.