Ten Dollars
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.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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