At my high school graduation party, Dad told me there was no money for college because “school was always harder” for me—while my 16-year-old sister had a new Jeep and $60,000 in her college fund. I already had a college acceptance letter in my pocket, but he wouldn’t even complete the financial-aid form. When I packed to move in with the uncle he called “the family loser,” Dad stood in the hallway and said, “You’ll be back by the Fourth of July.”
My dad told me there was no college money at my own high school graduation party. Standing by the garage with a paper plate of pulled pork in his hand. “School was always harder for you, buddy.” He said it nicely, like he was doing me a favor. Mom nodded along next to him. “We just didn’t think you’d really go, honey.” 20 ft away in the driveway sat my little sister Skyler’s white Jeep. She got it in March on her 16th birthday.
Her college account had just passed $60,000. I knew the number because Dad told me himself back in the spring. He was proud of it. That night, I packed two duffel bags and a laundry basket. Dad watched from the hallway with his arms crossed. “Go on then. Go live with the family loser. You’ll be back by the 4th of July.” At 11:00, my uncle Hoyt’s old white Ford pulled into the driveway right behind the Jeep.
On the door, in hand-painted red letters, it said Emmett and Sons Pumping. About 10 miles down the highway, he asked me. “He ever tell you why he calls me that?” “Because you took Grandpa’s business.” I said, “That’s what he always said.” Hoyt drove a whole mile before he answered. “That’s what he tells people.” He didn’t bring it up again for 6 years. I’m Reed. 6 years after that night, my dad sat across a desk from me asking for a job.
My sister sat next to him asking for one, too. And before he walked out, he told me half of my uncle’s company was his. Let me back up. My dad’s name is Monty. For 26 years, he was the controller at the wire plant on the east side of Sedalia, Missouri. If you don’t know what a controller is, don’t worry.
He’d be happy to explain it to you. He explained it to every waitress, every pastor, and every guy who ever sold us a lawn mower. He was the first one in his family to finish college, and he never let a Thanksgiving go by without somebody hearing about it. Dad ran our house the way he ran the plant.
There was a spreadsheet for the electric bill. There was a spreadsheet for Christmas and there was a college account for Skyler that he opened the week she was born. I know that because he told the story at her baptism lunch, at her 8th grade graduation, and at my high school graduation party about 40 minutes before he told me there wasn’t one for me. I never had an account.
I found that out at 14 when I asked. Dad said, “We’ll cross that bridge, buddy.” I guess we crossed it by the garage. Skyler was the smart one. That was just a fact in our house. Like the furnace being in the basement. She read early. She got the little certificates. She made the honor roll every quarter.
And Mom stuck every one of them to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a cardinal. I was a C student until about my junior year when something clicked and I started pulling B’s and then mostly A’s in anything with numbers in it. Nobody moved the magnet. I also had a job. From 15 on, I worked summers and Saturdays at the grain elevator on the west side of town, sweeping, running the probe on trucks, whatever they needed.
By graduation, I had $6,800 saved. Not a fortune, but it was mine. And here’s the part my parents didn’t know. In October of my senior year, I’d applied to the University of Central Missouri over in Warrensburg by myself on the computer at the school library. In December, I got the letter. Accepted business major.
I didn’t tell anybody. I wanted to show them at the party. I had the letter folded in my back pocket the whole time Dad was talking about how school was harder for me. I wasn’t going to ask them for money. I’d already done the math. I was going to ask for one thing.
There’s a financial aid form every college student in America fills out. And until you’re 24, the government treats you like your parents are still paying for you, whether they are or not. So, they need your parents’ tax information. Without it, you get almost nothing. That’s all I wanted. Dad’s half of a form, 20 minutes at the kitchen table.
I never got to ask. He told me about school being harder for me, and Mom said they didn’t think I’d really go, and I stood there with the letter in my pocket and decided I wasn’t going to hand it to either one of them. Later that night, while I packed, I did ask about the form. Dad didn’t even look up from his phone.
I’m not putting my tax returns on some government website so you can borrow money you’ll never pay back. So the letter stayed in my pocket. It went to Warsaw with me. Now, Uncle Hoyt is my dad’s older brother, 3 years older. Their dad, my grandpa Emmett, started Emmett and Sons Pumping in 1971 with one truck.
Septic tanks mostly, and a few portable toilets for construction sites and the county fair. Grandpa painted the sign over the shop door himself. When he passed, Hoyt kept the business going. Dad went to college. That was the whole story as I knew it. Grandpa died. Hoyt took the business. And Dad got nothing.
Dad told it at Christmas. Dad told it at Grandma Doris’s birthday. Dad told it so many times that when Hoyt walked into a room, I already knew how to feel about him. The family loser, divorced, never went to college, lived in an apartment over his own shop, pumped septic tanks for a living.
When Hoyt showed up at Christmas in a clean flannel shirt, Dad would say, “Look who washed his hands.” and everybody would laugh and Hoyt would smile and eat his ham. The only real conversation I ever had with him was at Grandma Doris’s funeral when I was 14. He found me out by the church parking lot where I’d gone because I didn’t want anybody to see me cry. He didn’t say anything about crying.
He just handed me a business card and tapped the number written on the back in pen. You ever need anything, you call this one, not the shop, this one. On the drive home, Dad saw the card sticking out of my shirt pocket. Don’t get any ideas, he said. I kept it in my wallet for 4 years.
The night of my graduation party, I called the number on the back. Hoyt answered on the second ring like he’d been sitting next to the phone. I said, “It’s Reed.” And then I didn’t know what to say next. He said, “Where are you?” I told him. He said, “Pack a bag. I’m leaving now.” That was it.
He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t ask what Dad said. He was there in 40 minutes. The next morning, I woke up on a couch in the office of Emmett and Sons Pumping out on Highway 65 south of Warsaw. A metal building, a gravel lot, one pump truck, and 40 blue portable toilets lined up on a flatbed trailer like they were waiting for a bus.
There was a woman at the desk already, gray hair, reading glasses on a chain, coffee going in an old percolator that sounded like it was trying to start a lawn mower. She looked at me over her glasses. You must be the nephew. Yes, ma’am. I’m Marva. I do the books. I do the phones.
And I do not make breakfast. There’s cereal upstairs. She pointed at the ceiling with her pen. Hoyt says you’re good at math. I’m all right. Good, she said. He isn’t. I walked out to the lot with my cereal. Over the shop door hung Grandpa’s sign. Old wood. The paint faded to pink where it used to be red.
Emmett and Sons Pumping since 1971. I remember standing there with the bowl in my hand thinking, “Sons with an S.” Two of them, but only one ever showed up for work. I didn’t ask. I figured it was just a sign. By noon, my phone said, “No service.” Dad had taken me off the family plan.
I hadn’t even been gone a full day. Marva looked at my phone and then at me. Betty called the phone company before he finished his coffee. Hoyt drove me to the Walmart in Clinton that afternoon and bought me a prepaid phone. When I tried to pay him back, he said, “Take it out of your first check.” What check?
The one you’ll get Friday. You start Monday. Mom called the new number about a week later. I don’t know how she got it. Probably from Hoyt, who probably figured she should have it. Your father’s hurt, Reed. Come home, tell him you’re sorry, and we’ll forget all about this. No, Reed. Honey, be reasonable.
I said no, Mom. She hung up. I didn’t hear from her again for a long time. Here’s what you have to understand about the business. People hear pumping and portable toilets and they make a face. My dad made that face for 30 years, but that’s not what the job is. The job is trucks and timing.
You deliver 40 units to a construction site by 6:00 in the morning so the crew never has to think about it. You set up 20 units at a church picnic before the first lawn chair comes out. You service the route on schedule every time so nobody ever calls the office to complain. Hoyt’s whole philosophy fit on a sticky note.
He had it on the dash of his truck in his own handwriting. Be there before they need you. Nobody ever thanks you in this business. He told me my first week. That’s how you know you did it right. The day somebody notices you is the day you messed up. I worked the route Monday, Wednesday, and Friday plus Saturdays all summer.
In August, I started at central Missouri. Warrensburg is about an hour north of Warsaw. So I drove up Tuesdays and Thursdays in a beat up work truck Hoyt let me use and took the rest of my classes at night online. The money part took some doing without Dad’s half of the form. The financial aid office said there was nothing they could do.
Then a lady named Mrs. Albright took pity on me. She said there was one thing. If I could prove my parents had cut me off and weren’t supporting me, she could approve a small student loan in my name only. Not much, just a few thousand a year, but something. So, Hoyt sat down at his kitchen table upstairs and wrote a letter in his slow, careful handwriting, saying that I lived with him, worked for him, and hadn’t gotten a dollar from my parents since the night of my graduation.
He signed it. Marva notarized nothing because she’s not a notary, but she typed it up so it looked official, and Mrs. Albright said that would do. Then, Hoyt said something I didn’t expect. Company pays part of school for anybody who works here. Marva looked up from her desk. Since when? Since today. Hoyt, there’s one employee.
Then it won’t cost much. It costs more than it should have for a company with one truck. Marva said it was a write-off. Later, I found out a write-off doesn’t mean free, and Hoyt went without a new transmission for his own truck that year so he could cover my tuition. He never mentioned it.
Marva did years later. Between the elevator money, the small loan, and what the company paid, I made it through the first year without a single dollar from home. And the whole first year, nobody from home asked how I was doing. Not one time. The idea that changed everything came from a bride’s mother.
Summer after my first year, we set up portable units at a barn wedding outside Lincoln. The mother of the bride walked out, looked at our blue units in the grass, and said, “Oh, I was hoping for the nice kind.” I asked her what she meant. She meant a restroom trailer. If you’ve never seen one, picture a little white trailer with steps up to a door and inside it’s like the bathroom at a nice restaurant.
Flush toilets, sinks with running water, mirrors, lights, air conditioning, the kind of thing you’d see at a fancy wedding or a golf tournament. She told me the nearest company that rented them was up in Columbia and they were booked every weekend through October. She’d called in January. I went home and looked it up.
She was right. There was one company in Columbia and one down by Springfield, and both were booked solid all summer. They rented for over $1,000 a weekend, and there was nobody, not one company in the lake area or anywhere around Sedalia. I filled two pages of a notebook that night. In the morning, I put it in front of Hoyt at the shop.
He read it twice. Then he took his glasses off. You want me to borrow money for fancy toilets? I want you to borrow money for one fancy toilet. A used one. Two stalls, a sink, air conditioning. There’s one for sale in Kansas City for $38,000. If we book it 12 weekends a year, it pays for itself in a year and a half.
Weddings alone could do that. He looked at the notebook. He looked at me. “Your dad said school was harder for you.” “School is,” I said. “Math isn’t.” Hoyt went to the bank in Warsaw that Friday and borrowed against the shop. That was the first time I realized what he was risking for me.
It was his building. It was the only thing he had. We booked that first trailer for 19 weekends that summer. Weddings, a family reunion, a church homecoming, a car show in Clinton. By the next spring, we had a second one. By the spring after that, we had four. Skyler graduated from high school 2 years after me.
Big party, bigger than mine. Mom rented a white tent for the backyard and hired a caterer. And because Mom didn’t want 150 people tracking through her house, she ordered a restroom trailer through the tent company. The tent company didn’t own any restroom trailers. Nobody in Sedalia did. So they called us. I saw it on Marva’s schedule on a Tuesday.
Saturday delivery, a street address I’d known my whole life. Marva watched me read it. You want me to send Junior? Junior Teague was our first hire after me. A big quiet guy who could back a trailer into a space with 2 in on either side. No, I said I’ll take it. I pulled up Saturday morning at 7.
Dad came out of the garage in a polo shirt with a cup of coffee and stopped halfway down the driveway when he saw the truck. Emmett and Sons Pumping right there on the door. Then he saw me get out. Your mother ordered from the tent people, he said like that settled something. Tent people call us, I said.
We’re the only trailers in four counties. He didn’t say anything to that. He watched me level the trailer, hook up the water, run the cord to the outlet on the side of the house. Two years earlier, he told me I’d be back by the 4th of July. Now I was back in his driveway, plugging into his house.
Skyler came out on the porch in a sundress. She was 18 now with her college already picked out, the University of Missouri in Columbia, marketing. She looked at the trailer, then at me. Oh my gosh, Reed, you deliver toilets now? restroom trailer, I said. Air conditioned, nicer than the upstairs bathroom. She actually laughed at that.
Then she looked at Dad and stopped. Mom came out next. She didn’t say hello. She looked at the trailer, looked at the street, and said, “Could you move it around back? I don’t want people seeing it from the road. Around back’s where the tent is, Mom. It’s where it goes.” She went back inside.
Dad finished his coffee. Send somebody else to pick it up tomorrow. Nobody else works Sundays, I said. I’ll be here at 8:00. I was there at 8. The trailer was spotless, by the way. Whatever else you want to say about that party, 150 people used our trailer, and not one of them complained.
The third year was the big one. We’d outgrown the bank in Warsaw, being able to say yes on a handshake. We wanted four more trailers, a second service truck, and enough money to bid on something bigger than church picnics. The bank sent us to a loan officer named Gordon Pike, a careful man with a careful mustache who wanted every piece of paper with the company’s name on it, going back to the beginning.
“Your grandfather left this business to two sons,” he said. “I need to see how it ended up with one.” So, one Saturday, Hoyt and I went into the back corner of the shop where Grandpa’s old four drawer filing cabinet sat under a blue tarp. It hadn’t been opened in years. The drawers squealled.
It smelled like old paper and engine oil. Hoyt pulled the top drawer open, flipped through, and took out one folder before he let me dig. He set it on top of the cabinet face down. On the tab, in Grandma Doris’s handwriting, there was just one letter, M. Then he stepped back and said, “Go ahead.
Everything else is fair game.” I found Grandpa’s will. I found the original papers for the business from 1971. I found a photo of Grandpa standing next to a pump truck that looked like a Model T. I didn’t touch the folder with the M. When we went to see Gordon Pike, Hoyt handed him everything I’d found.
And then he took one more paper out of an envelope, the paper from that folder, and set it on the desk. Gordon read it, nodded, and slid it back. Well, he said, “That settles that.” Hoyt put it back in the envelope. I never saw what it said. Not then. I’ll get to that folder.
We got the loan, and that August, we won the restroom contract for the Missouri State Fair. The fair is in Sedalia. 11 days every August, 300,000 people, livestock barns, the grandstand concerts, the whole thing. The old vendor had lost the contract the year before after a lot of complaints, and the fairboard wanted trailers by the grandstand and the exhibit halls.
We were the only company close enough to service them every night. So that August, Emmett and Sons Pumping was everywhere in my dad’s hometown, on every unit by the midway, on every trailer by the grandstand, on the trucks going up and down the fairgrounds roads at 5 in the morning. Dad’s buddies from the plant sent him pictures. I know because Mom called.
Your father can’t even walk past the grandstand. Every building out there has your uncle’s name on it. Could you at least take the name off for the fair? No. Reed, it’s embarrassing for him. It’s Grandpa’s name, Mom. It’s been on that sign since before Dad was born. You know what I mean? I do.
I said and no. That Thanksgiving was the first time anybody from home invited me to anything. Mom called the week before. Come for Thanksgiving. Just you. Your father doesn’t want a scene. Is Hoyt invited? Reed. Don’t make this into then I’ll come the year he’s invited. Thanksgiving dinner that year was at Marva’s house with her husband Delmare who carved the turkey with an electric knife like he was diffusing something.
Hoyt brought a pie from the gas station and acted like he made it. Marva led him. Nobody called the next November or the one after that. I graduated in May of the next year. Bachelor’s degree in business, a 3.6 grade point average, and I’d worked the route the whole time. Hoyt and Marva drove up to Warrensburg and sat in the stands.
Hoyt wore a tie that I’m pretty sure was older than me. And when they read my name, he stood up and clapped so loud the people in front of him turned around. My parents didn’t come. I didn’t expect them to. I hadn’t sent an invitation and they hadn’t asked. That afternoon, Mom texted, “Congratulations!” with an exclamation point.
Then 4 minutes later, a picture of Skyler holding her deans list certificate from Mizzou. Hoyt read it over my shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He just took me to Golden Corral, which is where Hoyt takes people when he’s proud of them. The next two years went fast. We kept saying yes to things.
More fairs, construction crews on the new highway work, the bass tournaments on Truman Lake, a big golf tournament at the Lake of the Ozarks, graduation parties, weddings, festivals. We put a second yard on the north side of Sedalia in my dad’s town because that’s where half our customers were. By the summer I turned 24, Emmett and Sons Pumping had 22 trucks, 15 restroom trailers, about 1,200 units, and 31 people getting a paycheck every Friday. Marva signed every one of them.
She still wouldn’t make breakfast. I ran operations and did the hiring. Hoyt still drove a route on Fridays because he said if he ever stopped, he’d forget what the job was. That January, the wire plant closed. It was on the news in Sedalia for a week. The company moved everything to a plant in Tennessee and 240 people lost their jobs, my dad included.
26 years. He was 57. I heard about it from Marva who heard about it from the radio. Mom called in March. She sounded different, smaller. Your father sent out over 40 applications, Reed. 40. Nobody wants a 57-year-old controller. They all want somebody young they can pay less. I said I was sorry to hear it.
I was. His severance runs out in May, she said, and we still owe on the house. She waited like I was supposed to fill in the rest. I didn’t. In May, Skyler graduated from Mizzou with her marketing degree, the one her $60,000 bought. She moved back home and got a part-time job at a clothing boutique on Ohio Avenue, while she sent out applications, too.
And then the first week of June, Marva walked into my office and closed the door behind her. Your dad called for Hoyt. For the owner, she said he asked for an appointment with the owner. He said it like I was the receptionist at a law firm. What Hoyt say? Hoyt said Reed does the hiring.
The appointment was Tuesday at 10:00. They came in Mom’s car, all three of them. Dad wore a sport coat in June. Mom wore her church clothes. Skyler had a leather portfolio under her arm, the kind with a zipper all the way around. I hadn’t seen my father in 4 years. He looked older, grayer around the ears.
He looked around my office like he was pricing it. Then he sat down across from me and slid a resume across the desk. “I’m not here as family,” he said. “I’m here as a professional.” Okay. A company this size needs somebody watching the money controller, chief financial officer, whatever you want to call it. I’ve got 26 years.
We don’t have a chief financial officer, I said. We have Marva. From the hallway through the open door, Marva called out, “And Marva’s not retiring.” Dad’s jaw moved. He tried again. “Office manager, then somebody’s got to run this place, right?” “Somebody does,” I said. “Me?” Skyler unzipped her portfolio. “And I could do your marketing.” “No offense, but your website looks like it was made in 2009.
You’re not even on Instagram. I could build you a whole brand.” I looked at the two of them. My father, who told me school was harder for me. My sister, who got $60,000, and a Jeep. We do have openings, I said. Route texts and trailer setup, $17 an hour, overtime in the summer.
Trucks leave at 7:00. It’s the same job I started on. Dad laughed. It wasn’t a real laugh. I have a degree in accounting, Reed. I have a degree in business, I said. I still started on the route. Skyler zipped her portfolio back up. I’m not driving a toilet truck. Nobody asked you to drive anything yet, I said.
You’d ride with Junior for the first month. Mom put her hand on Dad’s arm. Monty, tell him. Dad leaned forward. He put both elbows on my desk like he used to at the kitchen table when I brought home a bad report card. Let’s be honest with each other, buddy. Half of this should have been mine.
Dad left the business to both of us. It says it right on the sign. Sons. He tapped the desk. Hoyt took it and I let him because I had a career. But I’ve talked to a lawyer friend of mine. Partnerships don’t just disappear. I didn’t say anything. So you can offer me 17 an hour, he said, standing up and buttoning his sport coat.
Or you can think about what’s fair. Talk to your uncle. At the door, he turned around. “Think about it, buddy.” They left. I sat there for a minute. Then I went upstairs to Hoyt’s apartment where he was eating a bologna sandwich over the sink. I need to see the folder, I said. He didn’t ask which one.
He set the sandwich down, wiped his hands on a dish towel, and went to the little safe in his closet. He put the envelope on the kitchen table, the same table where he’d written my letter for Mrs. Albright 6 years earlier. Inside was one page, typed on the letterhead of a lawyer in Sedalia, a Mr. Kessinger, who I later found out had passed away years ago, dated April of 1998, about 6 months after Grandpa died. It said that Monty, son of Emmett, sold to Hoyt, son of Emmett, his full 1/2 share of Emmett and Sons Pumping, the truck, the tanks, the customer list, and the use of the name for $9,000, paid in full.
And at the bottom was my father’s signature, that slanted, careful signature I’d seen on every report card I ever brought home. Behind it, stapled, was a copy of a cashier’s check for $9,000 made out to my dad. I read it three times. April of 98, I said. Hoyt nodded. I knew that month.
Everybody in my family knew that month. Every year on their anniversary, Mom told the story of how she and Dad closed on the house the week of their first anniversary, April of 98. She told it like a fairy tale. They’d gotten lucky, found the down payment. He sold you his half to buy the house.
I said he wanted out. Hoyt said. He’d just started at the plant. He had a new wife and he didn’t want anything to do with pumping septic tanks. I didn’t have $9,000. I borrowed it from the bank and paid it back for 10 years. He shrugged. I was still paying it off when you were in grade school.
Then why does he tell everybody you took it? Hoyt picked up his sandwich, looked at it, and set it back down. Easier to be the brother who got robbed than the brother who sold his dad’s truck for a down payment. Grandma knew. Mr. Kessinger knew. Your mother knew. Everybody else heard his version.
Why’d you keep the name sons? Because Dad painted that sign, he said. I wasn’t going to take a son off it just because one of them left. And you never told me. 6 years, even after he put me out. He’s your dad, Reed. Hoyt looked out the window at the lot. I wasn’t going to make you pick.
He already picked for me, I said. By the garage. Hoyt didn’t argue with that. I took the paper downstairs, made a copy on Marva’s machine, and put the original back in his safe myself. Dad texted Hoyt on Thursday. Hoyt showed me. Coming Saturday morning to talk to my brother. Family business should stay in the family.
Hoyt typed back with one finger. Shop opens at 7:00. Saturday, they came at 9:00. All three again. Dad, Mom, and Skyler. Marva came in too on a Saturday, which she never does. She said she had filing to catch up on. She didn’t file a single thing. Dad didn’t go to my office this time.
He walked straight to Hoyt, who was standing by the coffee pot, and set down a paper on the counter, a copy of Grandpa’s will. There, Dad said. Equal shares to my sons, Hoyt and Monty. It’s right there in Dad’s own will. I’ve let this go for 25 years, Hoyt. I’m done letting it go.
Hoyt didn’t say anything. He looked at me. So, I walked over and laid the copy of the bill of sale right on top of the will. Dad looked at it. I watched him read the top line and I watched him get to the bottom where his own name was. His face went the color of the sign out front.
Mom’s hand went to the little gold cross at her neck. She didn’t need to read it. She knew what it was. Skyler leaned over Dad’s shoulder and read it out loud slowly. The way you read something you don’t understand. Sells his full 1/ half share, including the use of the name. $9,000. She looked up.
Dad, what is this? That’s old. Dad said that was a It was basically a loan, a family arrangement. It says sold, I said. It says the name. It says paid in full. And that’s your signature, Dad. I’ve seen it on every report card I ever brought home. You used to sign them right under the C’s.
You don’t understand how it was back then. April of 98, I said. Mom, when did you two close on the house? Mom didn’t answer. Every anniversary, I said, every single anniversary, you tell everybody you closed on the house in April of ’98. You said you got lucky with the down payment. That was the luck.
Grandpa’s truck. Hoyt borrowed the money from the bank to buy you out and he paid it off for 10 years. And then Dad told the whole family for 25 years that Hoyt stole it. We needed a house, Reed. Mom said very small. So you knew it was easier for people to She stopped. easier for people to think Hoyt was the loser, I said.
Yeah, I heard that one my whole life. Skyler was still looking at the paper. You told me Uncle Hoyt took Grandpa’s business. My whole life, Dad. You told me that at Christmas. Every Christmas. Dad didn’t look at her. Then he did what he always did. He turned it into a story about himself.
He straightened up and tugged his sport coat down. I’m the one who made something of myself. 26 years at that plant. I put a daughter through college without a dime of debt. I didn’t spend my life pumping. And the plant’s gone, Dad, I said. And he’s still here. 31 people got paid in this building yesterday.
Marva signed every check. Everyone, Marva said from her desk without looking up. You came here for a desk, I said. I offered you a truck. That’s not an insult. That’s the same job Hoyt offered me the night you put me out. It’s the best thing anybody ever did for me. Dad’s voice went up.
So that’s it. My own brother’s going to turn me away. And Hoyt, who hadn’t said a word the whole time, put his coffee cup down on the counter. Nobody turned you away, Monty. He said, “The boy offered you a job. Same one he took when you sent him out of your house with two duffel bags.
He didn’t have $9,000 and nobody bought anything from him.” It got very quiet in the shop. You could hear the percolator. Dad looked at Hoyt, then he looked at me, and then he said it anyway. You think you’re real smart now, don’t you, buddy? You told me school was always harder for me, I said.
Maybe it was, but I can read a date, Dad. And I can read your name. Nobody said anything for a long time. “The route jobs open until Monday,” I said. “Both of them. Seventeen an hour. Trucks leave at 7:00. They leave whether you’re on them or not.” Dad picked up the will. He left the bill of sale where it was.
He walked to the door without a word and Skyler followed him with her portfolio held against her chest. Mom stopped at the door. She turned around and looked at me. “We’re still your parents, Reed. I asked you for one thing, Mom,” I said. “Not money, one form. 20 minutes at the kitchen table.
You had 6 years to be my parents. You’re 6 years late.” She went out. The door swung shut. Grandpa’s sign rattled on its hooks over the frame. Marva got up, poured three cups of coffee from the percolator, and set one in front of me, one in front of Hoyt, and kept one for herself.
Well, she said, that’s my filing done. Nobody heard from a lawyer. Not that week, not that month, not ever. I’ve thought about that a lot. Somewhere in Sedalia, there’s a lawyer friend of my dad’s who either told him the truth or never existed. Monday morning at 6:55, a car pulled into the lot.
It wasn’t my dad. It was Skyler. White sneakers, a ponytail, and a big insulated water jug. She didn’t say much. She said, “Mom said I need to bring in something.” That was it. I put her with Junior. Junior is a patient man. She lasted until Tuesday at noon. It was 91° and they were setting up 40 units at a road construction site south of Clinton.
And she sat down in Junior’s truck, turned the air conditioning all the way up, and called Mom to come get her. Marva mailed her a check for a day and a half, $24 before taxes. Marva said she put a stamp on it like she was mailing a birthday card. Dad never came at all.
The rest of it, I found out the way everybody finds things out in a small town. In July, Skyler’s white Jeep showed up on the front row of a used car lot on Broadway with a price written on the windshield in yellow marker. Mom told her sister, my aunt Gail, that they needed the house payment more than they needed a third car. Aunt Gail told her hairdresser.
The hairdresser told Marva. Skyler drives Mom’s old Equinox now. She’s still at the boutique on Ohio Avenue. Last I heard, she had a second job doing social media for a dentist’s office, which honestly, good for her. And then came August, the state fair. The fair hires a lot of seasonal people every year.
Ticket booths, gate checkers, parking. It pays about $12 an hour, and it’s mostly retirees and college kids. The first Thursday of the fair, I was driving a golf cart from the grandstand to the livestock barns at about 6:00 in the evening to check a trailer and I cut across the big parking lot on the south side. There was my dad, yellow vest, orange flag, a visor from the fair with a little blue ribbon on it.
He was waving cars into rows right next to the grandstand, right in front of 12 white restroom trailers lined up end to end, every one of them with Emmett and Sons Pumping on the side in red. He saw me. I saw him see me. He didn’t wave. He lifted the flag a little like he was waving me through and then he turned around and waved the next car into the row.
I didn’t stop. I had a trailer down by the swine barn with a sink that wasn’t draining. That night after the last trailer was serviced and the fairgrounds were mostly dark. I drove back to Warsaw. Hoyt was sitting on the tailgate of his truck in the gravel lot. The same old white Ford eating sunflower seeds and looking at the shop.
I sat down next to him for a while. Neither of us said anything. Then I said, “I saw Dad at the fair.” “Yeah, parking cars.” Hoyt spit a shell into the gravel. Honest work. That’s what I told him 6 years ago. He almost smiled. I looked up at the sign over the shop door.
Grandpa’s sign. Emmett and Sons Pumping since 1971. The paint was peeling worse than ever, and one of the hooks was bent from the door slamming. I’m going to get that repainted, I said. Somebody in Clinton does old signs. We could fix the letters. Keep it the same. Hoyt looked at the sign for a long time. “Leave the words alone,” he said. “It says sons, Hoyt.” “I know what it says.” He handed me the bag of sunflower seeds. “Still two of us.” My dad told me I’d be back by the 4th of July.
He was right that I’d be back. He was wrong about everything else. I went home that night. It just wasn’t his.
Disclaimer: This story is fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. Any names, characters, places, or events are fictitious or used fictitiously. No real person or organization is intended to be portrayed.
