The Tools He Worked Off

The trailer door was open three inches when I pulled up to the house that Tuesday morning, and I knew before I set the brake.

I keep that padlock on a little retractable reel so it never hits the paint. The reel was hanging loose. The hasp was bent where somebody had worked a bar into it.

I sat in the truck a second with my coffee going cold in the holder. Then I got out and swung the door the rest of the way.

The foam cutouts were still there. That is the part that got me. The gray foam in the big red cases, cut to the shape of each tool, and most of the shapes were empty.

My framing nailer, gone. The two impact drivers. The big hammer drill. The grinder, the multi-tool, the sawzall, the two batteries that cost more than the tools used to.

Milwaukee red, every piece of it, built up over eleven years one paycheck at a time. I counted the empty slots twice because the first time my hands were not steady enough to point.

Six thousand dollars. I did not have to guess. I had bought the last of it in March and I remembered the total because I had winced writing the check.

On the workbench, where the sawzall should have sat, there was a slip of paper folded in half.

The slip of paper

It was a pawn ticket. Hilltop Loan and Jewelry, out on the bypass, the one with the yellow sign I had driven past a thousand times and never once walked into.

The handwriting on it I knew. I had seen it on Christmas cards and on the back of a photograph and once on a note that said thank you for letting me stay.

Cody. My wife’s little brother.

The ticket listed it all in a pawnbroker’s shorthand. Power tools, assorted, Milwaukee. The loan amount was eleven hundred dollars.

Eleven hundred. He had handed a man six thousand dollars of my work and walked out with eleven hundred, and I stood there doing that math and feeling sick in a way that had nothing to do with the money yet.

I called Angie from the truck. I did not yell. I have never been a yeller, which my father was, and I decided a long time ago I would be the other thing.

“The trailer got hit,” I said. “Tools are gone.”

She made a sound. Then she went quiet, the way she does when she already knows and is hoping she is wrong.

“There’s a pawn ticket,” I said. “It’s Cody’s writing, Ang.”

The quiet on the other end stretched out so long I thought the call had dropped.