Part 8

Three weeks after the interviews, on a Thursday morning, Justin came back.

He came by himself at 7:15 while the crews were loading up and stood in the waiting area with his hands in his pockets.

He didn’t look at me at first.

“I was wrong,” he said. “About the attics. About a lot of things. Dad kept saying the market would come back, and I kept believing him. Then I watched my sisters come home every night tired and filthy and happy, and I realized I’ve never once come home happy from work.”

He paused.

“So I’d like to take the test.”

I set him up in the break room.

He got a 97.

Of course he did.

I didn’t make a speech.

I just slid a hard hat across the table, white with a Hagadorn Electric sticker on the front.

He turned it over in his hands.

“Dad told me about the building,” he said. “In the garage. He said your brother rewired my whole building and I didn’t even notice.”

He sounded embarrassed.

“I’ve never heard him sound like that.”

I put Justin on Roy’s crew, and Roy handed him to Silas to show him the ropes.

A twenty-nine-year-old former senior developer taking orders from a teenager.

He hated it for three days.

Then Silas showed him how to bend conduit, and Justin got so into the angles that he stayed after his shift to practice on scrap.

Silas said he was kind of a nerd about it.

It runs in the family.

A week before Thanksgiving, Arla came into my office with a work order and a look on her face like Christmas had come early.

It was a panel upgrade in Ames.

The customer had just bought an electric car and needed a charger in the garage.

He’d called the front desk like anybody else, accepted the quote without haggling, and asked for the following Tuesday.

The name on the work order was Martin.

“He didn’t mention you once,” Arla said. “I quoted him full price. He said that was fine.”

I put Kirby on it as the journeyman in charge, and Caitlin and Alexis as his apprentices.

I didn’t go.

It wasn’t my job to stand in my dad’s garage.

It was my sisters’ job to do the work and his job to watch.

They went on Tuesday.

I heard about it from three different people.

Kirby said, “Went fine.”

Then, after a long pause, “He made coffee.”

Alexis said Dad stood in the garage doorway for almost four hours with a cup of coffee he never drank.

He asked her why the breakers went in a certain order, and she explained it, and he just said, “Huh.”

She said it was the first time in her life she’d explained something to Dad and he just listened.

When they finished, Caitlin labeled every breaker in tiny, neat block letters with the fine-tip marker I give every apprentice on day one.

Kitchen counter, east wall, furnace, garage, car charger.

Dad read every label.

Then he went inside and came back with his checkbook.

Caitlin brought the check back to the shop that afternoon and set it on my desk.

It was made out to Hagadorn Electric for the full amount to the penny.

And in the memo line, in small, careful letters, he’d written:

Paid in full. Thank you, Nolan.

Seven years ago, he stood in our living room and told me that when I came back asking for money, we’d talk about engineering again.

I never did come back asking.

Not for the truck, not for school, not for the shop.

Not once.

And here it was, the first dime that had ever passed between my father and me since that night.

And it was going the right direction.

I didn’t frame it.

I deposited it.

Harvey would never forgive me otherwise.

But a copy is taped inside my office door at eye level, where I see it every morning at 6:30.

We had Thanksgiving at the shop this year.

That was Mom’s idea.

We pushed the tables together in the break room.

Arla brought a ham.

Kirby brought his wife, who talked enough for both of them.

Mom brought three pies.

Harvey sat at the head of the table because I made him.

Dad came late in the corduroy jacket and stood in the doorway looking at all of it.

Then he walked over to Harvey, held out his hand, and said, “Mr. Hagadorn, I believe I owe you a thank you for a lot of years of mornings.”

Harvey shook his hand, held on to it a little longer again, and said, “Call me Harvey, and sit down, Martin. The ham’s getting cold.”

Dad didn’t say much through dinner, but at one point Alexis and Justin got into an argument about why a breaker trips, and I saw Dad watching them.

He wasn’t frowning.

He was listening.

After pie, he came and found me out in the yard where I’d gone to check on a truck that didn’t need checking.

He stood next to me for a while.

Then he said, “I used to think I could tell which kids would amount to something by the second week of class. I was wrong about you. I’m not sure I can fix it.”

“You don’t have to fix it,” I said. “I already did.”

He laughed.

Not his professor laugh, a real one.

It surprised both of us.

Then he went back inside, and a few minutes later I heard him asking Kirby how a car charger circuit works, and Kirby actually answered him.

I’m twenty-five now.

I own the shop.

I pay Harvey his note every month, and every month he tries to give some of it back.

My brother and my two sisters work for me.

Mom brings muffins on Wednesdays.

And on the third floor of a building in Ames, there’s a panel labeled in tiny block letters that my dad walks past every morning.

Alexis told me last week that he started saying hello to it.