My Boys Worked the Food Bank Line

“Todd says you’re a deadbeat,” Jackson said into his chili on a Thursday night in February, and he did not look up from the bowl when he said it.

Wyatt stopped chewing. He was nine, and he had a cracker halfway to his mouth, and he held it there like it might go off if he moved.

I set my spoon down. I did it with my left hand, because my right arm was still strapped to my side in a black brace that went around my chest and buckled under my good arm.

“When did he say that?” I asked. I kept my voice the same as if I was asking about a spelling test. I had practiced that voice a lot that winter.

“Sunday,” Jackson said. “At supper. Mom was there. He said it to her, but we were right there. He said you were two months behind and that’s what you call a guy like that.”

“What did your mom say?” I asked him. He shrugged. He was twelve and had just started shrugging at everything, the way they do at that age.

“Nothing,” he said. “She just got up and got the salad dressing.”

That was the part that sat in my chest. Not Todd. I could take Todd. It was Heather getting up from the table for the salad dressing while our boys sat there and listened to it.

I want to tell this straight, so here is where I was that month. I am a millwright.

I set and align machinery, pumps and gearboxes and conveyors, mostly at the grain processing plant on the south end of town, and I had been doing it for sixteen years.

The March before, a gearbox slipped in a rigging sling while I was guiding it down onto its base. It was about four hundred pounds.

I got my arm under it to keep it off another man’s hand, and the shoulder came apart in three places.

Two surgeries. A plate, some anchors, and a surgeon in Iowa City who talked to me like I was a set of x-rays.

Workers’ comp paid while I healed. In Iowa they call it healing period benefits, and it came to about two thirds of what I had been bringing home.

Then in December the surgeon wrote down that I had reached maximum medical improvement. That is the phrase.

It means you are as good as you are going to get. The healing checks stop that week, the same as a light switch.

After that there was a rating for the shoulder, a percentage, and that paid out for some more weeks. Those weeks ran out the first week of January.

The plant had no job for a millwright who could not lift anything past his chest, and they told me so in a nice letter.

The child support had come out of the comp checks the whole time, the rating checks too. The state had a withholding order on them, so it went to Heather before I ever saw the money.

When the checks stopped, the support stopped with them. I was two months behind and I knew it to the dollar.

The night Jackson said it, I had two dollars and twenty-eight cents in checking.

The chili we were eating came from the county food bank. So did the bread on the table and the peanut butter in the cupboard and the gallon of milk in the refrigerator door.

I had started going in January, after my rent took everything the rating check gave me.