He set his glass down on the granite he’d helped install, raised his head, and looked his brother square in the eye. Then my husband said, “Kurt, go get Dad’s book off the shelf in your office. The green one you took out of the shop.”
Kurt went. I think he went because forty people were watching and he could not think of a reason not to.
Their father ran a fabrication shop in that town for thirty-one years and he kept a job book. Every job, one line. Date, customer, what it was, hours, and what was charged. He taught both his boys to write the line before they washed their hands, and only one of them kept doing it.
Kurt kept the book because it looked good on a shelf. Wade kept the habit.
There are four spirals of Wade’s in our hall closet. Twenty years, and the family jobs are in there with everybody else’s, hours logged, charged column blank.
The deck railing was ninety-one hours. The trailer was thirty-eight. There is a Saturday in February 2011 in there that says gate hinges, four hours, minus eleven degrees, which is the day Wade came home and could not close his hands around a coffee cup.
Three thousand one hundred and sixty hours since 2006. Wade said that number out loud on his brother’s new floor and I watched the room do the arithmetic on it.
But he did not stop there, and this is what I did not expect, because Wade has said maybe forty sentences in a row twice in his life.
He opened the old green book to 1994 and turned it around so Kurt could see it, and on that page, in their father’s hand, is a job for the first tanning salon. The build-out. The whole electrical, the frames, the sign bracket, three hundred and some hours.
Charged column blank.
And under it, the line the old man wrote in every book he ever kept:
No charge, boy’s business. Logged so he can see someday what a family put under him. A man who thinks he started with nothing will treat everybody like they have nothing.
Kurt read it twice. He read it a third time. Then he said, quiet, in front of the salon crowd and the granite and the whole business, “I didn’t know Dad did that one.”
Wade said, “I know you didn’t. That’s the problem with free.”
He picked his glass back up and finished the evening like nothing happened, because that is who he is, and I was so proud of him I could not speak.
Kurt called on a Wednesday. He came over on a Saturday. He has come over most Saturdays since, and he holds things and grinds and does what he is told, and the nickname has not been used once in this family since that night.
Wade has him writing the line before he washes his hands.
And I have quit letting it ride. Twenty years I laughed along to keep a room comfortable, and my husband deserved better from me than that.