It should have been four thousand.

Four thousand a month. Every month. For eleven years, minus the first three when it was less. It was always four thousand. On the fifth. Like clockwork.

I stared at it. I turned it over. I looked in the envelope to see if there was another one. A second check. A note. Anything.

There wasn’t.

Don kept thirty-two hundred dollars of October. Wages Travis had already worked for.

Travis worked every single day of October. Thirty-one days. Including Sundays, because it was weaning season. Fourteen-hour days. He worked October thirty-first until three in the afternoon, when the black baldy hit the gate.

He’d earned every dollar of that check before he ever broke his arm.

“To cover the days he’ll miss,” Don said on the phone.

Travis called him that night. From the kitchen, standing at the counter with the phone pressed against his left ear. I stood in the doorway and listened.

“Don,” Travis said. “The check’s short. I think there’s a mistake.”

I couldn’t hear Don’s side. Just a low rumble through the phone.

Travis’s face changed.

“The days I’ll miss,” he repeated. “Don, I worked October. All of it. That’s for October.”

The rumble again.

“Okay,” Travis said. “Okay. I understand.”

He hung up.

He stood there at the kitchen counter for a long time with his back to me.

“He said he’s holding it back,” Travis said finally. “To cover the days I’ll be out. He said he’s got to hire another man to get through shipping, and somebody’s got to pay him. He said he’d make it right when I’m back.”

“Travis. That’s your October. That’s money you already earned.”

“I know,” Travis said.

“He can’t do that.”

“I know, Case.”

Travis asked him twice to make it right.

Once on the phone. That first night.

Once at the pens. A week later. Travis drove out to the shipping pens on the Hollister place with his arm in the sling. Don was there, loading calves on a pot trailer to go to the feedlot in Dalhart. Travis stood at the fence and waited until the trailer pulled out.

Then he walked up to Don.

He told me about it that night.

“I said, Don, I need my October pay. I’ve got a mortgage. I’ve got a hospital bill. I’ve got a little girl.”

“What did he say?”

Travis looked at his cast.

“He said, We’ll settle up when you’re back.”

Both times, Don said, “We’ll settle up when you’re back.”

As if Travis had asked for a favor. As if it was a loan. As if it was something Don was doing for us.

When you’re back. Like Travis was on vacation. Like he’d chosen to stand at that head gate when a fifteen-hundred-pound cow came through it.

Chapter Four: The State

I called the state that week.

I sat at the kitchen table on a Wednesday afternoon when I got home from the school cafeteria, and I looked it up on my phone. The Texas Workforce Commission. They handle wage claims. If your employer doesn’t pay you what you earned, you can file one.

I called the number. I sat on hold for an hour and ten minutes. Emma did her spelling homework across from me while I listened to the hold music.

The woman who finally answered was kind. Her name was Rosalinda. She’d been doing this for nineteen years.

She listened to the whole thing. Halloween. The chute. Eight hundred dollars instead of four thousand.

“He can’t do that,” she said. “In Texas, you have to be paid what you earned. He can’t just hold back wages for days your husband hasn’t worked yet. That’s a wage claim. A clear one.”

“So what do I do?”

“You file,” she said. “Online. You’ve got a hundred and eighty days from when the wages were due.”