Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 18 of 60

Eduardo woke before the sun and drove to the feed store with the angel woman's scrap of paper folded in his shirt pocket. The old man was already at the loading dock, sorting sacks by weight. He looked up when Eduardo climbed down from the truck and did not smile, but did not turn away either. "I heard you might come," the old man said. He wiped his hands on his apron. "I need a hauler. Six days a week. Dawn to noon. Pay is honest and small. You break your word, you don't come back." "I won't break it," Eduardo said. "Prove it by loading that pallet." Eduardo took off his cap and set it on the truck seat. He worked through the morning. He hauled grain sacks from the back room to the wagons of two farmers, then stacked feed by the door. His shoulders burned. His shirt stuck to his back. At noon the old man handed him an envelope with the week's pay written on the outside and the cash inside. "Friday I'll want you here at five," the old man said. "Not five and one minute." "Yes, sir." Eduardo drove into town with the envelope on the seat. He had enough for the week's food, a can of paint, and the nails he needed for the porch rail. He had enough to keep the repairs moving. The tools would not have to be sold down to nothing. He drove past his turn and kept going to the round tea house with the wraparound porch, because it was Friday and he had given his word to come. He climbed the steps with the ledger under his arm. The white-haired woman in the purple robe was watering a pot of mint on the rail. She looked up and studied him the way someone studies weather. "You smell like grain dust," she said. "Sit. I'll bring you something for your shoulders." He sat at one of the lace-covered tables. She came back with a cup that smelled of ginger and something greener he did not know, and a single tarot card face down beside it. "Ledger," she said. He opened it to the week's page. He laid the envelope from the feed store beside it and named the amount. She read down the column, checked his numbers against the receipts he had clipped, and signed the bottom in small, even letters. She turned the card over. A figure with a staff, walking. "Work you begin," she said. "Not work you finish. Come back next Friday." "I will." He drank the tea. It was bitter and warm. When he set the cup down his hand was steady. He walked out with a signed page, a paid week, and a job to return to at dawn.