I was sitting right there at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold in the ceramic mug when my phone buzzed against the oilcloth. The kitchen was quiet except for the electric refrigerator humming in the corner and the heavy sound of wind rattling the screen door out on the porch. My cousin Arlette had been dating this fellow named Dwayne for about three months, and according to her, he was turning his life around. That was always the phrase she used when she brought home another man who looked like he had spent the last ten years sleeping in the back of a rusted pickup truck.
Dwayne needed a job bad, or at least that was what Arlette told me when she cornered me down at the post office on Saturday morning. My uncle Ross always said you should never mix family with the payroll down at the county gravel plant, but I had worked that scale house for thirty-two years and folks down there usually listened when I put in a good word. I figured I could hand his paper to Dale over in maintenance and get him pushing a broom or greasing axles before the spring haul started up.
The text message popped up on the screen while I was wiping a stray drop of coffee off the table. It was from Dwayne himself, using numbers I figured he must have gotten off Arlette’s phone. He wanted to know if the pit where I worked was hiring and if I could get him on.
I stared at the little glowing screen for a minute, listening to the clock above the sink ticking off the seconds like a slow heartbeat.
I texted him back, “Do you have any experience?”
It took him ten minutes to write his answer back, and I remember watching the little three dots bouncing on the screen like he was wrestling with every single letter. When it finally came through, my eyes had to trace over the words twice just to make sure I was reading them right. He replied, “Yes I just got a bunch of stuff on my record. But I feel like some of these jobs ought to steal hire you weather you got a mister meaner or a fella knee.”
“OMG…”, I replied, “what was the felony for?”
He said, “It was a salt and battery charge.”
I just sat there looking at the phone until the screen went dark on its own.
Salt and battery. He meant assault and battery, of course, but the way he spelled it out like he was talking about seasoning food made my brain stutter. I should have told him no right then and there. I should have sent back a short message saying the books were closed and the county wasn’t taking on anyone with a record that fresh.
My mother always told me that when a man shows you he cannot even spell the crime he committed, you ought to run the other way before he asks you to hide the shovel. But I was tired, and Arlette had been crying on my front porch just the night before about how hard things were getting out on the county road. I let myself believe that people make mistakes when they are young and foolish, even though Dwayne was thirty-eight years old and had arms covered in ink that looked like they had been done with a ballpoint pen in the county lockup.
OMG…SMH…I can get him on but who’s going to fill out the application for him?’ That was the text I sent back to Arlette, thinking I was being funny, thinking I was just venting to family about the sheer weight of carrying other people’s burdens. I did not know that phone of mine was sitting on the front desk over at the plant half the time when I left it charging near the coffee maker. Dale walked right past my desk while I was out on the scales weighing three tandem loads of crushed limestone, and he saw the whole exchange glowing right there in broad daylight.
The next morning when I came in at 6:00 AM, the office felt different before I even took my coat off. Dale was standing by the large map of the quarry pit on the wall with his arms folded across his flannel shirt, and he did not even look up when the screen door slammed shut behind me. He just pointed a thick finger at the metal desk where my ledger sat closed.
“We got a zero-tolerance policy on hiring convicts, Clara,” Dale said, and his voice sounded flat like a wet board. “Especially ones who don’t know the difference between table salt and a felony.”
I stood there by the heater with my lunch pail in my hand, feeling the heat rise up my neck until my ears felt like they were on fire. I tried to tell him it was just a joke between cousins, that I wasn’t really going to bring a man with an assault record into the scale house where we kept the petty cash drawer unlocked. But the words sounded thin and greasy even to my own ears. I had typed those words out with my own thumbs, and there was no taking them back once Dale had read them off the glass.
He didn’t yell at me or raise his voice the way old men do when they are mad. He just reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a yellow slip of paper that was already filled out with my signature at the bottom for the retirement board review next month. He laid it right on top of my ledger without a word.
“You’ve been here thirty-two years, Clara,” Dale said softly, looking out the dirty window at the empty trucks lined up by the hopper. “You should have known better than to put that kind of business in writing.”
I didn’t argue with him because I knew he was right, and that realization hurt worse than if he had cussed me out. I walked out of that office before the shift whistle blew at seven o’clock, leaving my coffee mug on the edge of the desk right where it had sat every morning since my husband passed away. The gravel crunched under the tires of my old station wagon as I backed out of the lot, throwing white dust up against the gatepost.
Arlette called me around noon asking if Dwayne had the job yet, and I didn’t even pick up the receiver. I just let it ring until the machine caught it, listening to the tinny sound of her voice asking if I was mad at her over a silly little text message. I sat there at my kitchen table with the sun coming through the window, looking at the empty space where my phone usually sat, and realized I had traded thirty-two years of honest work for a salt and battery joke.
