Behind him at a small workbench sat old Billy Ramos, working on an old Hitachi nail gun. Billy had worked for Holden’s father since he was fourteen, and some of the men said he was Holden’s half brother by a Mexican señorita, covering their mouths when they said it because the old deaf bugger could read lips at a hundred yards.
Holden looked up at last and Danny said, “I just came in to tell you I gotta take off, Ben.”
“You gotta take off.”
“Yes, sir.”
Holden looked at the punch clock on the wall, and Danny turned to look too. The clock said 3:45.
Holden said, “You’re telling me you can’t wait fifteen minutes and finish out the day?”
“No, sir. I’m telling you I gotta take off as in I can’t keep this job. I wrapped up early so I could come in here and let you know.”
Holden leaned back in his chair and began a slow rocking, raising the same birdy chirp from the chair’s spring with each backward tilt. Danny watched him, then looked up, as if to inspect at close range the rivets in the metallic ceiling. Outside, in the hollows of the building, men were gathering tools, shutting down compressors, coiling cords and air hoses—all men, this crew, no women. You could hear in their voices that it was Friday. Payday.
Holden said, “I don’t even consider a raise till a man’s been with me six months, but I might make an exception if I knew you were gonna stick around. And I wouldn’t say that to just anyone, so.”
“I appreciate that,” Danny said. “But it’s not the money. This has been a good job. I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t have to.”
Holden’s eyes narrowed. “You in some kind of jam?”
“Jam?”
“Jam. Like the kind where some man comes knocking on that door tomorrow flashing me his badge.”
Danny looked back at Billy Ramos. Working on the nail gun, not watching, feeling the vibrations of the trailer, of Holden’s voice.
“Don’t mind him,” Holden said. “He’s just in here for ballast.”
“No, sir,” Danny said, turning back. “Nothing like that. I just have to go, that’s all.”
“Just go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You gonna tell me where you’re just going to?”
“Just heading home.”
“Home, as in Minnesota home?”
“Yes, sir. My dog died.”
Holden’s chair stopped chirping. Billy, behind him, paused too in his tinkering.
“Did you say your dog?” Holden said.
“Yes.”
“Thought so. Well.” He resumed rocking. “A man can get close to his dog, sure enough. Can be a real loss. I remember a dog I had as a boy, just an old dumb mutt from God knows where, but the day he died, oh boy . . .”
The letter was folded back into its envelope, and the envelope was folded into the back pocket of his jeans. It had come the day before but he’d opened it today on his lunch break, sitting alone on the far side of the building. Familiar paper, familiar handwriting—even the smell of the air that escaped the opened envelope. Writing first of the weather as she always did and then of the farm, any repairs that had needed doing and how they’d gotten done or if they would have to wait—not mentioning money, never mentioning money, in case he thought she was asking him to send more, had told him over and over not to send any, to take care of himself and not worry—and then writing a little about Marky, one funny thing or other he’d said, before moving on to tell him some news she wasn’t sure she should include but just wanted him to hear it from her first, and this was the two college girls who’d gone into the river in their car, just a few miles south, into the ice, and one of them, the one who lived, was Audrey Sutter, Sheriff Tom Sutter’s daughter, and not a week later Tom Sutter himself, who was in stage four cancer, was dead from a heart attack. The funeral two days ago, the man buried in the same cemetery where so many had been buried: her father and mother, her grandparents, Danny’s father.
Tom Sutter. Sheriff Sutter. The name conjured blue eyes and a small room and the taste of cigarette smoke and the feeling of choking on your own voice.
Lastly, and abruptly, as if she’d been putting off the true point of the letter and must write it quickly to get through it, she wrote, Danny, I’m sorry to tell you we buried old Wyatt too. It was his time, and