The Friend I Sent to Prison

"Evan, I know what I did was rotten."

Lucas talked fast, the words running over each other, half of it pleading.

"But you know how it was at my house. My folks were sick. I'm the only son they've got. I needed something steady or the whole family goes under.

"You're different. You're smart, you pick things up fast. You did all right down south, didn't you?"

He held out five ten-dollar bills.

"Take the fifty for now. If it's not enough I'll bring you more after next month's check. I'll make it right with you. Okay?"

I looked at the money in his hand. Then I looked at his face, and I'd never seen anything so practiced.

Make it right?

Pretend it never happened?

The university place they took from me. The four years of my life. The road I should have been walking this whole time.

Fifty dollars.

I didn't take it. I flicked my wrist, and the bills slid out from under my hand and went down into the gray coal dust on the pavement.

Whatever was left of the pleading went out of Lucas's face. What came up behind it was offense, as though I were the one who'd insulted him.

"Don't push your luck, Evan." He kept his voice low and cold. "I lowered myself. I apologized. What else do you want out of me?

"It was a name. One name. Are you going to hang onto that forever?

"Four years. Four years, and you come back here to settle old scores? What's the point?"

The first shift was coming through the yard, and more of them were stopping. The whispering got louder.

Lucas heard it. His face changed again, tired now, and hurt, as though he'd been putting up with me for years. He spread his hands to the men around us.

"I know it eats at him," he said. "He didn't get into school back then. Now he comes back and sees how I've done here, and of course it bothers him."

One sentence, and I was the jealous one. The sore loser. The man making a scene.

I watched him do it. I watched the contempt settle on the faces around us, and the curiosity behind it, people waiting to see how bad it would get.

And my head cleared for the first time since I'd walked through that gate.

He'd fooled me once. He'd fooled me for four years. He wasn't going to fool me for the rest of my life.

I didn't argue. I didn't raise my voice. I didn't give them a scene.

I'd earned this job with my hands, and I wasn't going to lose another piece of my life to him.

I turned and walked toward Workshop Two.

We had time, Lucas. Plenty of it.

Every last thing you buried under a lie, I'd dig up. Every last thing you took, I'd take back myself.

At noon the cafeteria was packed, a few hundred men shoulder to shoulder. I carried a tray of creamed cabbage and egg noodles to a table in the corner.

I'd gotten two bites down when somebody sat across from me.

Nathan Brooks. We'd grown up two farms apart. Four years had filled out his face and his belt, and the plant had clearly been good to him.

"Evan?" He leaned in, staring. "It's really you. Somebody in the shop said Workshop Two brought in a machinist back from down south. I figured it was just the same name."

I got a smile out of somewhere. "Nathan."

He took another mouthful and frowned.

"Weren't your grades about the best in the county? How'd you end up going south to work?"

He shrugged.

"Still, getting hired on as a specialist isn't bad. Technical job. Pay's decent."