Dad laid one ten in Jasper’s palm and closed his fingers over it.
He did it gently. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. He wasn’t being cruel about it. He folded my son’s hand shut around that ten-dollar bill the way you’d fold a kid’s hand around a quarter for the gumball machine.
Then he turned to my sister’s boys.
He counted two twenties into Reid’s hand. One. Two.
Then two more into Corbin’s. One. Two.
“Those two are going places,” Dad said.
It was the first Saturday in May. A little after one in the afternoon. The kitchen in Dad’s farmhouse smelled like cut grass and the pot of coffee he’d made at six that morning and was still drinking.
All three boys had mowed the same yard.
Same two acres. Same three hours. Same May heat, eighty-six degrees and humid, the kind that makes your shirt stick to your back by ten in the morning.
They’d split it up the way Dad told them to. One rode the old John Deere riding mower. One ran the push mower around the house and the trees and the propane tank. One ran the weed eater along the fence rows and the ditch by the road.
They traded off every week. That way nobody got stuck on the weed eater all summer. Dad’s rule.
Jasper is twelve. My sister Trina’s boys are sixteen and fifteen.
Jasper had been on the weed eater that day. The worst job. The one that throws grass and rocks and bugs up into your face and makes your arms buzz for an hour after you stop. He had green stains all down the front of his white T-shirt and a little cut on his cheek where a rock had flown up and nicked him.
Reid had been on the riding mower. Air on his face. Sitting down.
Jasper didn’t say a word.
He just looked at the ten in his hand. Then up at me.
I’ll never forget that look.
It wasn’t angry. Jasper’s not an angry kid. It wasn’t even sad, exactly. It was confused. Like he was working out a math problem in his head and couldn’t get the answer to come out right.
Like he was trying to figure out what was wrong with him.
My name is Brady Whitaker. I’m forty-one. I’ve been a lineman for Prairie Land Electric Cooperative for nineteen years. I climb poles and fix power lines across four counties of north-central Kansas, in ice storms and thunderstorms and hundred-degree heat.
I’ve had a lot of things happen to me up a pole. I’ve been bit by a fox squirrel and stung by a whole nest of wasps and shocked hard enough to see stars. I fell twenty feet once in 2011 and broke my ankle.
None of it hurt like that look on my son’s face.
It was Dad’s money. Dad’s yard. Dad’s kitchen. Dad’s decision.
And nobody fights his own father over a mowing wage.
I know that. I knew it then. Glen Whitaker is seventy-three years old. He farmed this ground for forty-five years. He’s had two stents put in his heart since Christmas. He takes nine pills every morning out of a plastic box with the days of the week on it.
You don’t stand in a seventy-three-year-old man’s kitchen and yell at him about ten dollars.
But I could make it right in front of him.
I pulled out a chair at Dad’s kitchen table.
The same oak table I ate breakfast at every morning until I was eighteen. My mother bought it at an auction in Beloit in 1979. There’s a burn mark on one corner from where I set down a hot pan when I was fourteen and got whipped for it.
I sat down across from Dad.
I took out my wallet.
“Hold out your hand, bud,” I said.
Jasper looked at me. He didn’t understand. But he held out his hand. The one with the ten in it.
I opened my wallet. I took out a ten-dollar bill.
I laid it on top of Dad’s ten.
“Twenty,” I said.
Out loud. Not loud. Just clear. The way you’d count change back at a register.
I laid down another one.
“Thirty.”
One more.
“Forty,” I said. “Same as your cousins. Thank you for your work.”
Dad didn’t say a thing.
He just sat there across the table from me in his bib overalls and watched me count. His face didn’t move. His coffee cup was halfway to his mouth, and it stayed there.
Reid and Corbin were standing by the screen door with their forty dollars. Neither of them said anything either. Corbin looked at the floor.
Jasper closed his hand around the four bills. He looked at me.
“Thanks, Dad,” he said quietly.
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank your grandpa. It’s his yard.”
Then I stood up and pushed in my chair.
Chapter Two: The Next Saturday
The next Saturday, Dad laid down the same ten.
The boys came in at one o’clock, sweaty and grass-stained, the way they did every Saturday. They’d swapped jobs. Reid on the push mower. Corbin on the weed eater. Jasper on the riding mower, which he loved. He’d been grinning the whole time. I could see him from the porch, doing perfect stripes up and down the side yard, the way Dad taught him.
They lined up at the kitchen table.
Dad counted two twenties into Reid’s hand. Two into Corbin’s.
Then he laid one ten in Jasper’s palm.
I pulled out the same chair.
I sat down across from him. I took out my wallet. I didn’t look at Dad. I looked at my son.
“Hold out your hand, bud.”
Jasper held it out. Faster this time. He knew what was coming.
“Twenty,” I said. One ten. “Thirty.” Another. “Forty.”
“Same as your cousins,” I said. “Thank you for your work.”
Dad didn’t say anything. He drank his coffee.
And the Saturday after that.
And the one after that.
Every Saturday in May. The boys would come in from mowing. Dad would count out forty and forty and ten. I’d pull out the chair and sit down and count out thirty more.
Same words. Every time.
Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Same as your cousins. Thank you for your work.
I never raised my voice.
I want that on the record. Not once. Not a single Saturday. I never said a word to Dad about it, before or after. I never argued. I never asked him why.
I never once said the word fair.
I just counted. Out loud. One bill at a time. Sitting at his kitchen table, across from him, where he had to watch.
Thirty dollars a week is real money at our house.
People think linemen make a lot. We do all right. But I’ve got a mortgage on a three-bedroom ranch in Mankato and a truck payment and Andrea’s student loans from nursing school. We’ve got Jasper’s speech therapy and his tutor. We’ve got a twelve-year-old who eats like a grown man.
Thirty dollars is a tank of gas. It’s half a week of groceries. It’s what we put back every Saturday for Jasper’s braces, which he’s going to need in about a year.
I paid it anyway.
Every week, I’d stop at the ATM at the Mankato bank on Friday after work and take out three tens. Andrea saw it in the checking account. She didn’t say anything for the first two weeks.
The third week, she said something.
We were in bed. The window was open. Frogs going in the ditch across the road.
“Brady,” she said in the dark. “Thirty dollars a week.”
“I know.”
“That’s a hundred and twenty a month. Through August, that’s almost five hundred dollars.”
“I know, Andi.”
She was quiet for a while.
“Are you going to talk to him?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s his money. And his yard. And he’s seventy-three. And he’s got a bad heart.”
She rolled over and looked at me. I could see her eyes in the light from the yard light outside.
“Don’t you dare raise your voice to your dad,” she said. “Not with his heart. I mean it, Brady. Two stents since Christmas. Dr. Shah said his ejection fraction’s at thirty-five percent. You get him worked up, you could kill him.”
Andrea’s a nurse. She works the cardiac floor at the hospital in Concordia. She knows things about hearts that I don’t want to know.
“I won’t,” I said. “I haven’t.”
“I know you haven’t.” She put her hand on my chest. “I’m just saying. Whatever this is between you two. Don’t let it be the thing that does it.”
I lay awake a long time that night.
Thinking about Jasper’s face. The confused look. Like he was working out a math problem that wouldn’t come out right.
And thinking about Dad. Counting two twenties into Reid’s hand. Those two are going places.
Where exactly did he think my son was going?
Chapter Three: What’s Wrong With Him
You need to know about Jasper. So you understand.
My son is twelve years old. He’s tall for his age, skinny as a fence post, with my brown hair and his mother’s green eyes. He’s going into seventh grade at Rock Hills Junior High in Mankato.
He has dyslexia.
We found out in second grade. He couldn’t read. Not a little behind. Couldn’t. The letters moved around on him. B and D. P and Q. He’d look at the word “was” and see “saw.” His teacher thought he wasn’t trying. She sent home notes. Jasper needs to apply himself.
He was seven years old and he cried every night over his reading homework.
We got him tested in Salina. A specialist. She said dyslexia. She said it had nothing to do with how smart he was. She said he was actually very bright. Especially with numbers. Especially with spatial things. Taking things apart and putting them back together.
She was right about that.
At ten, Jasper took apart Andrea’s old vacuum cleaner on our kitchen floor and figured out why it wouldn’t suck. A string wrapped around the beater bar. At eleven, he fixed the chain on the riding mower at Dad’s place after Dad had been fighting it for a week. He can look at an engine and tell you what’s wrong with it by the sound.
But he still reads at about a fourth-grade level. He has an IEP at school. He goes to a reading tutor twice a week in Beloit. He gets C’s, mostly. A few D’s. An A in shop.
Trina’s boys are different.
Reid is sixteen. He’s a junior. He has a 4.0. He’s in the National Honor Society and on the scholars bowl team. He wants to be an engineer. He already got a letter from Kansas State.
Corbin is fifteen. A sophomore. He’s the starting quarterback for the Rock Hills Grizzlies. Six foot one, a hundred and eighty pounds, and he can throw a football fifty yards on a line. Everybody in Jewell County says he’s going to play in college.
Those two are going places.
That’s what Dad said.
I know what he meant. I’m not stupid.
He meant college. He meant scholarships. He meant getting out of Jewell County, Kansas, where there’s more cattle than people and the only jobs are farming or the co-op or the grain elevator.
He meant Reid and Corbin were going to be somebody.
And Jasper was going to be… what? A kid with a learning disability who fixes lawnmowers? A lineman, like his dad?
That was the part that kept me up at night. Not the money.
I’ve been climbing poles for nineteen years. I’ve kept the lights on in four counties through some of the worst storms in Kansas history. I’ve worked thirty-six hours straight in ice and wind. I’ve restored power to hospitals and nursing homes and farmhouses with old people on oxygen.
But in my father’s house, I was never going places.
Because I didn’t go to college. Because I stayed in Jewell County. Because I came home every night to Mankato, eleven miles from where I grew up, and mowed my own lawn and paid my own mortgage and drove out to my parents’ place every Saturday for twenty years to help.
And now my son wasn’t going places either.
On the drive home from Dad’s that first Saturday, Jasper was quiet. He sat in the passenger seat of my truck looking out at the wheat fields.
“Dad,” he said finally. “Why did Grandpa give me less?”
I didn’t know what to tell him.
“He thinks Reid and Corbin are going places,” Jasper said. “Because they’re smart.”
“You’re smart, bud.”
“Not like them.” He looked down at his hands. “I’m in the slow reading group. Everybody knows.”
I pulled the truck over. Right there on Highway 36, on the gravel shoulder, with a semi going past so fast it rocked us.
I turned and looked at my son.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You mowed the same yard. Same grass. Same three hours. Same heat. You ran the weed eater, which is the worst job on the place. You did it right. You did it all the way. Your grandpa doesn’t pay you for how you read. He pays you for how you mow.”
Jasper didn’t say anything.
“And you mowed it just as good as they did,” I said. “So you get the same. That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
Chapter Four: Trina
I found out why in the middle of May. From my sister.
Trina called me on a Wednesday night. I was in my truck in a co-op equipment yard in Smith Center, waiting for a bucket truck to come back from the shop. It was almost dark.
“Brady,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“Okay.”
“Dad told me what you’ve been doing. On Saturdays. Counting out the money.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He’s upset, Brady,” she said. “He doesn’t say it. But he is. He sits there every Saturday after you leave and doesn’t touch his lunch.”
“Good,” I said.
“Brady.”
“What do you want me to do, Trina? Let my son take ten dollars while your boys take forty? For the same yard?”
She was quiet for a long time. I could hear her TV in the background. A cooking show.
“I didn’t ask him to do that,” she said finally. “I want you to know. I didn’t know he was doing it until the second Saturday. Reid told me.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“Because I know why he’s doing it,” she said.
My sister is thirty-eight. Three years younger than me.
Two years ago, her husband, Kyle, walked out. On a Tuesday in April. He went to work at the feedlot in the morning and never came home. He left a note on the kitchen counter that said he couldn’t do it anymore. He moved to Colorado with a woman he met online.
He’s been behind on child support for eighteen months. Four hundred and twenty dollars a month per kid. He owes over fifteen thousand dollars. The State of Kansas is supposedly garnishing his wages. Nothing ever comes.
Trina works at the Mankato Family Dollar and cleans houses on weekends. She’s raising two teenage boys on about thirty-one thousand dollars a year.
“Reid hasn’t talked to his father since Christmas,” Trina said. “Kyle called him. Reid hung up on him.”
“I know.”
“Corbin won’t say his name. He just calls him ‘him.’” Her voice cracked. “And you know what Corbin said last fall? After a game? He threw for three touchdowns and they won and everybody was cheering, and he came home and went to his room and wouldn’t come out. And I went in and he was crying. He said, Mom, nobody’s ever going to see me play except you.”
“Dad’s trying to make up for it,” Trina said. “For Kyle. He’s trying to be their dad. He goes to every game. He goes to every scholars bowl meet. He drove Reid to Manhattan for the engineering camp.” She took a breath. “And when he pays them forty dollars, Brady, he’s not paying them for mowing. He’s paying them because their father walked out.”
I sat in my truck in the dark equipment yard and didn’t say anything for a long time.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’d been so busy being angry about Jasper, I hadn’t thought about Reid and Corbin at all. About two boys whose father just quit them one Tuesday.
“I didn’t know that was why,” I said finally.
“I know you didn’t.”
“But Trina,” I said. “Jasper is his grandson too.”
She was quiet.
“He doesn’t have a father who walked out,” I said. “He has one who shows up every Saturday. Who’s been showing up every Saturday for twenty years. And he gets ten dollars.”
“I know,” Trina said softly. “I know, Brady. That’s why I didn’t say anything to him. Because you’re right. And I don’t know how to tell him you’re right without telling him he’s hurting my boys too.”
Chapter Five: The Pole
The week after Trina called, a storm came through.
It was the Thursday before Memorial Day. A line of thunderstorms out of Nebraska, with straight-line winds up to eighty miles an hour. It came across Jewell County around four in the afternoon like a freight train.
It took down forty-one poles between Mankato and Burr Oak. Snapped them off like toothpicks.
I was out for thirty-one hours.
By Friday morning, around six, I was up a pole on a section line road north of Formoso. Restoring power to a dairy farm. The family had three hundred cows that needed milking, and no electricity to run the machines. The farmer’s wife was standing at the bottom of my pole in rubber boots, holding a thermos of coffee for me.
I was tired. So tired I could feel my hands shaking in my rubber gloves.
And I was thinking about Dad.
Not about the money. About something else.
I was thinking about when I was sixteen. The summer I told him I wasn’t going to college.
I’d been accepted at K-State. Same as Reid’s going to be. I had the letter. My mom had it on the refrigerator with a magnet.
And I told Dad I wanted to go to the lineman program at the technical college in Beloit instead. One year. I’d watched the co-op crews come through after the 1997 ice storm, and I’d stood in our yard and watched them climb those poles in the ice, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
Dad didn’t say much. He never does.
He said, “Well. I guess you’re not going places, then.”
I hadn’t thought about that in twenty-five years.
But I thought about it up that pole outside Formoso at six in the morning, with three hundred cows bawling in the barn below me and a farm wife holding a thermos.
I finished the splice. I closed the switch. The yard light on the dairy barn came on. The milking machines started up with a rumble I could feel through the pole.
The farm wife cheered. Down at the bottom of my pole. In her rubber boots. She held the thermos up over her head like a trophy.
I sat in my truck afterward and drank her coffee and thought about it.
I’d been going places. For nineteen years. Every single day. Up poles and down poles, in four counties. To dairy farms and nursing homes and the hospital in Belleville. Places that had no lights until I got there.
I just never left Jewell County to do it.
I got home Friday night at eleven. I hadn’t slept in two days.
Andrea met me at the door. She took one look at me and put her arms around me.
“You smell like a pole,” she said into my shoulder.
“I am a pole.”
She laughed. Then she pulled back and looked at me.
“Jasper’s been waiting up,” she said. “He wanted to show you something.”
He was at the kitchen table. In his pajamas. It was way past his bedtime.
He had a shopping bag in front of him. From the Orscheln Farm and Home store in Belleville.
“I wanted to show you before tomorrow,” he said. “Before we go to Grandpa’s.”
He reached in the bag and pulled out a straw hat.
A cowboy hat. Palm straw, the good kind. Natural color, with a brown leather band around the crown and a little silver concho on the side. The kind Dad’s been wearing his whole life. His old one was so worn out the brim was coming apart and there was a hole in the top you could see daylight through.
“Grandpa’s birthday is next Saturday,” Jasper said. “His old hat’s falling apart. I saw him fixing it with duct tape.”
I stared at it.
“How much was it, bud?”
“Twenty-eight dollars and fifty-three cents,” Jasper said. “With tax.”
“Where’d you get the money?”
He looked at me.
“From the first thirty,” he said. “That you gave me. The first Saturday.”
Chapter Six: The Hat
I didn’t know what to say.
I sat down at the kitchen table across from my son. I was so tired I could barely see. My hands still smelled like rubber gloves and creosote.
“Jasper,” I said. “That was your money. You worked for that.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve bought anything. That new game you wanted. The part for your bike.”
“I know.” He looked down at the hat. “But I wanted to buy this.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for a long time. He turned the hat around in his hands.
“Because Grandpa taught me how to mow,” he said. “When I was eight. He sat on the riding mower with me and showed me how to do the stripes. He said you line the wheel up with the last row and you keep your eyes on the end, not on the grass. And your hands’ll follow your eyes.”
“I remember.”
“Nobody else ever taught me anything I could do right,” Jasper said. “Not at school. Everything at school I’m bad at. But Grandpa showed me the stripes, and I could do it. First try. And he said, Jasper, you’ve got a good eye.” He looked up at me. “He’s the only one who ever said I had a good eye.”
I didn’t trust my voice. I just sat there.
“I know he gives me less,” Jasper said. “I know he thinks Reid and Corbin are smarter. And they are. Reid’s going to be an engineer.” He shrugged. “But Grandpa still taught me the stripes. And his hat has a hole in it.”
He put the hat back in the bag.
“So I bought him a new one,” he said.
The next Saturday was Dad’s seventy-fourth birthday.
Trina made a cake. Chocolate with chocolate frosting, from a box. She put it on the kitchen table with seven candles, one for every ten years plus four.
The boys mowed in the morning. They came in at one, sweaty and grass-stained. Trina lit the candles. We sang. Dad blew them out in two tries. He’s got bad lungs from the stents.
Then Reid gave him a card. Corbin gave him a card. Trina gave him a new pair of work gloves.
Jasper gave him the shopping bag from Orscheln.
Dad pulled out the hat.
He held it in both hands. He turned it around and looked at the leather band. The little silver concho. He looked at it for a long time.
“Where’d this come from?” he asked.
“From me,” Jasper said. “For your birthday. Your old one has duct tape on it.”
Dad looked at him.
“How much did this cost?”
Jasper looked at me. I didn’t say anything.
“Twenty-eight dollars and fifty-three cents,” Jasper said. “With tax.”
The kitchen went very quiet.
I watched Dad do the math. I watched it go across his face.
Twenty-eight dollars. Almost exactly thirty. The thirty I’d counted out to my son at this same table, three weeks before. The thirty he wouldn’t pay.
Jasper had taken it and bought his grandfather a hat.
Dad didn’t say anything. He put the hat on. Right there at the table.
It fit perfectly. Jasper had taken the old hat to the store to measure it.
Dad pulled the brim down low. So low you couldn’t see his eyes.
And he kept it there.
He kept it there through the rest of the cake. Through Trina cleaning up the plates. Through the boys going out to load the mowers in the shed.
He wouldn’t take it off. And he wouldn’t lift the brim.
When we left that afternoon, he was still sitting at the kitchen table with the hat pulled down. His hands were flat on the table on either side of his coffee cup.
“Thank you, Jasper,” he said, from under the brim. Very quietly.
“You’re welcome, Grandpa.”
