Nobody's Number



The leg clicked on the linoleum. Click-click-click. Every three steps it clicked. Tom had stopped counting the clicks around 2015, when he realized that counting them was a form of madness, the kind of madness that doesn't make you scream or throw things or quit your job — the kind that makes you sit in front of a television at five in the evening, drinking a beer that tastes like water that has been stood up, and counting the clicks of a prosthetic leg on linoleum that was installed in 1998 and has not been replaced because replacement costs money and money is the thing that the mill used to give you and now gives you nothing except a letter on a company letterhead that says thank you for your service and here is your severance, which is fourteen weeks of workers' compensation and a promise that the company will keep your health benefits for six months if you send in the paperwork within thirty days, which Tom did, and which nobody processed, because the man who processed it died of a heart attack in his car on the way to lunch and the man who replaced him didn't know how to process it and the man who replaced him didn't want to and the man who replaced him didn't exist because the company had been sold to another company six months before and the new company didn't process anything because processing is for people who have time and time is for people who have money and money is for people who have a mill that hasn't been closed and shipped to Mexico and replaced by a mall that sells things made in China for prices that are lower than the cost of making them, which means someone, somewhere, is paying the difference with their life.



Tom's leg clicked. He stood in front of the TV. A baseball game was on. Nobody he recognized was playing. He drank his beer. It was a generic brand from the stop-and-go on Route 2 bisected by a railroad track and a parking lot where three cars had been abandoned since the late nineties and nobody had called the tow truck because the tow truck costs money.



The sign on the door of Quick Cash said OPEN. The letters were peeling. The O in OPEN was the worst — hanging by a thread, which is not metaphorically true but literally true, the O held on by a single strip of adhesive that Tom had been meaning to fix since March and had not fixed because fixing it would require a step ladder and step ladders cost money and money is not something you spend on a peeling letter when there are real expenses — prosthetic maintenance, ex-wife medical bills, the electric bill, the property tax, the insurance, the internet bill for a business that operates entirely on foot and phone and the occasional drive to the bank, which Tom does because the bank is afraid of ATMs and ATMs are afraid of Lorain, Ohio, population 63,000 and falling, and the bank is right about one of those things.



The door opened. The leg clicked. A man walked in. He was twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, wearing a jacket that was too thin for the weather and a expression that was too old for his face. He carried a brown envelope. It was thick. It contained money. Tom could tell by the way it sagged at the bottom, the way money sags when it is stacked in twenties — flat, rectangular, heavy.



"Huey," Tom said.



"Tom."



Huey Yates. Twenty-four. His father had worked at the mill. His father had stopped working at the mill in 2007 and started not working at the mill every day after that, which is the same thing, because not working at the mill every day is what happens when the mill is closed and shipped to Mexico and your name is on a list of two thousand people who used to work there and are now on a list of two thousand people who are not there.



Huey's father had died in 2014. Not physically — not yet. Physically he was still alive, living in a house in a neighborhood where the lawns had stopped being mowed and the porches had stopped being swept and the mail had stopped being delivered on time because the mail carrier had been transferred to a different route and the new mail carrier didn't know that Huey's father's house was the one with the blue mailbox and the overgrown azalea bush and the porch light that had been burned out since 2015 because the bulb had been ordered from Amazon and Amazon had not delivered it and the package had been held at the post office for thirty days and Huey's father had not gone to get it because going to the post office required a car and the car had been repossessed in 2014 and the replacement car, a 2003 Honda that had cost three thousand dollars and had been paid in cash over eight months, was currently sitting in the driveway with two flat tires and a radio that only played one station and the station only played one song and the song only played on Tuesdays and Huey's father would stand in the driveway on Tuesdays and listen to the song and then go inside and sit in a chair and not come out for three days.



Huey had a daughter. She was six. She had asthma. The asthma was bad — bad enough that she needed an inhaler every day and a nebulator three times a week and a doctor's appointment every two months, and the doctor's appointments were covered by insurance, and the insurance was through Huey's mother, and the insurance had a copay of forty dollars per visit and a prescription formulary that did not include the brand-name inhaler and the generic was half as effective and the nebulator was not covered at all and the nebulator cost two hundred and sixty dollars a month and Huey was paying it and the asthma was getting better and getting worse and getting better again and nobody could tell which it was doing at any given moment because asthma doesn't tell you before it tells you.



Huey put the envelope on the counter. It sagged. It contained two hundred dollars. Not three. Two. In twenties. Stacked flat. Heavy with the weight of a man who had worked a double shift at a warehouse in Elyria and come home with his back hurting and his feet swollen and his daughter asleep and his wife awake and the nebulator bill on the table and the credit card bill on the table and the electric bill on the table and two hundred dollars in his hand and no three hundred dollars.



"It's short," Tom said. He didn't say it angrily. He said it the way a man says the sky is gray — a statement of fact, not an accusation.



"I know."



"Eighty dollars short."



"I know."



Tom looked at the envelope. He looked at Huey. He looked at the envelope again. Huey was standing in front of the counter with his hands in his pockets and his head down and his shoulders hunched, the way a man stands when he knows he is about to be told something he doesn't want to hear and has spent the last three blocks preparing for it by telling himself, over and over, that it's going to be fine, that Tom is a good man, that Tom has been good to him since he was sixteen and came into this shop to sweep floors and count change and learn the difference between a quarter and a half-dollar and the difference between a debt and a promise and the difference between a promise and a prayer and the difference between a prayer and a hope and the difference between a hope and the thing that keeps you going when you don't have hope but you don't know that yet because you're sixteen and sixteen is a age where everything feels like the beginning of something important and the beginning of something important is usually just the beginning of the thing that will eventually kill you slowly and you will not notice because you will be too busy counting.



"Vince," Tom said.



Huey's face did something. It didn't change — not visibly. But something behind his eyes shifted, like a clock hand moving from one number to the next, and Tom had seen that shift before, seventeen years ago, when Huey was sixteen and Tom had handed him a handful of quarters and told him to count them and Huey had counted them with a speed and accuracy that Tom had never seen in anyone else and had looked up at Tom with eyes that said, without words, that he understood something about numbers that Tom hadn't realized numbers could say.



"Vince," Huey said. It was not a confession. It was not an apology. It was a statement of fact, like the sky being gray.



"How much?"



"Forty-seven thousand."



Tom stared at him. Forty-seven thousand dollars. A number that meant nothing and everything. A number that was the sum of every bad decision Huey had ever made and every good decision Huey had ever made that hadn't worked out and every decision Huey had never made because someone else had made it for him and every decision that had been made about him without his consent and every decision he had made in response to decisions that had been made about him without his consent, compounding, like interest, like a machine grinding people into numbers and then discarding the numbers when they no longer had any value.



"Forty-seven thousand," Tom said.



"His terms are flexible."



Tom looked at the envelope. He looked at the peeling O on the door. He looked at his leg, which was clicking on the linoleum, clicking, clicking, clicking, the way a clock clicks when it is measuring time that nobody wants to measure, the way a heartbeat clicks when it is measuring the time between now and the end, the way a man clicks when he is counting the days until the mill closes and the days after and the days until his daughter is born and the days after and the days until she needs an inhaler and the days after and the days until he owes forty-seven thousand dollars to a man who lives in a hotel room in Cleveland and calls himself Silvertongue because he talks his way out of everything and into everything and out of everything again and the only thing he can't talk his way out of is the knowledge that he is exactly the same kind of man as everyone else, except everyone else knows it and he doesn't, and that ignorance is not freedom but debt, and debt compounds.



"Eighty dollars short," Tom said again.



"I'll bring it next week."



"Vince won't wait."



"Huey," Tom said. "Vince doesn't wait. Vince buys debt for pennies on the dollar and then collects it at triple the original interest rate. You know this. You've known this since you were eighteen and I told you."



"I know."



"Then why —"



"My daughter." Tom looked at him. His eyes were not wet. They were not dry either. They were the color of the sky on a day when the sky is deciding whether to rain and hasn't decided yet. "She needs the nebulizer."



"I know."



"I need the money for the nebulizer."



"I know."



Tom turned away. He walked to the back of the shop, where the filing cabinet was, where the ledger was, where the names were — Huey Yates, debt $47,000, payments $9,200, remaining $37,800, interest rate 347% APR, minimum payment $12.50 per week. Tom opened the drawer. The ledger was there. He opened it to Huey's page. The numbers were there. The numbers always were. The numbers were the only honest thing in the room.



He closed the drawer. He walked back to the counter. He looked at Huey. He looked at the envelope. He looked at the peeling O on the door.



"Next week," Tom said.



Huey nodded. He turned and walked out. The door opened and closed. The leg clicked. The TV played baseball. The sign said OPEN.

Author Note & Copyright: