My Stepfather Ran Up a $7,200 Tab at My Feed Store and Said I Owed Him for Raising Me, So I Marked His Account Paid in Full

“I knew something was wrong for a whole year,” Mama said. “He’s been sleeping in the recliner. A man doesn’t sleep in a recliner for a year unless something is sitting on his chest.”

Earl stared at his boots. “My back,” he mumbled.

“Your back is fine, Earl Gaskin,” Mama said. “It was your pride.”

I almost laughed. It came out as half a sob.

They already had a plan, the two of them. They’d worked it out at the kitchen table until two in the morning with a yellow legal pad and the bank statements spread out between them.

They’d sell twenty of the older cows after weaning and keep the young ones. Every dollar would go on the second mortgage. Earl had already called the Pruitt boy at the bank that morning, before they drove into town, and set up a meeting for Monday to talk about paying it down early and lowering the monthly payment.

The money from the six bred cows Ray saw at the sale barn had already gone to catch up the two missed payments. That was why he sold them in October. Not to pay me. To keep the bank from sending a third notice.

And Mama was going to put a second refrigerator out at the end of the driveway and raise more hens. Forty more, she said. She announced it like she was declaring war.

“And I’m not touching your ticket,” Earl said to me. “You marked it paid. I’m not going to insult you by trying to pay it now. But I am not charging another thing in this store as long as I live.”

“I know you’re not,” I said. “Because I’m not going to let you.”

Then I said the thing I’d been thinking about since Tuesday. Since I sat on that forklift crying with a pallet of mineral hanging in the air.

“Earl, the mill truck comes in every Tuesday at seven. Twenty-some pallets. Mitch checks them in, and I run the forklift, and it takes us half the morning. And my shoulder’s been bothering me since last winter.”

He looked at me like he didn’t understand the words.

“I could use somebody,” I said. “Fifteen dollars an hour. It’s not much. It’s what we pay. Tuesday mornings, and whatever else comes in heavy during the week. You’d be on the books like anybody else. W-2 and everything.”

He just stared at me.

“You’re offering me a job,” he said slowly.

“I’m offering you the forklift,” I said. “You taught me on one. I figure you can still drive it.”

He laughed then. A real laugh. Wet and surprised. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“You still ride the brake,” he said. “I watched you through the window last Tuesday when I drove past. You ride the brake going into the dock.”

“I do not.”

“You do,” Mama said, without missing a beat. “I’ve seen it too.”

Earl showed up the next Tuesday at a quarter to seven, fifteen minutes before the mill truck.

He brought a thermos of coffee and a pair of brown leather work gloves so new they were still stiff, with the price tag still hanging off one wrist by a plastic string. I snipped it off with my pocketknife without saying a word.

Mitch met him at the back door and shook his hand.

Mitch isn’t a talker, like I said. But he held on to Earl’s hand a second longer than he needed to. And for Mitch, that was a whole speech.

I filled out the paperwork with Earl at my desk first. His W-4. His I-9. He wrote his Social Security number in careful block letters like he was taking a test.

“Seventy years old,” he said, signing his name at the bottom, “and I’ve got a boss again.”

“You’ve got a boss who knows how you take your coffee,” I said. “That’s more than you had at the co-op.”

Then I watched Earl climb up into the seat of our forklift.

He sat there for a minute with his hands resting on the levers, the way you sit in a church you haven’t been to in a long while.

Then he took the first pallet off that truck. So slow. So square.

Mitch looked over at me and raised both eyebrows.

Earl set it down on the dock without a sound. He didn’t say a word about it.

He worked until eleven. He didn’t ride the brake once. And he made sure I noticed.

When we were done, he sat on the edge of the dock with his thermos and his new gloves in his lap. I sat down beside him. Our feet hung over the edge like two kids on a creek bank.

“Your mama paid two hundred ninety-six dollars in egg money for my feed,” he said, looking out at the alley. “You know how many eggs that is?”

“Seventy-four dozen,” I said. I’d figured it out on Saturday night.

He shook his head slowly.

“Seventy-four dozen eggs,” he said. “Thirty-six years, and that woman still finds ways to embarrass me into being a better man.”

“She’s good at it,” I said.

“She’s the best there is.” He took a sip of coffee. Then, without looking at me, he said, “So were you. Last Saturday. With that marker.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

He bumped my shoulder with his. Just once.