The woman in the contractor’s office in Watford City read the invoice to me twice, slow the second time, like she thought I had not heard it right.
I had heard it fine. I just could not make it mean anything else.
“Twenty-two tie-in welds on the gathering line, Raina. Billed by Shawna Pell, rig and welder, six hundred thirty-six dollars a weld. Thirteen thousand nine hundred ninety-two, so call it fourteen thousand. Paid in full on the seventeenth. Your ticket came in the next day, so the system kicked it back as a duplicate.”
I was sitting in my rig truck in the yard behind my house outside Keene.
It was a little after three on a Monday afternoon, and the wind was laying the grass flat all the way to the road.
“Can you tell me who signed the daily tickets?” I asked her. She went quiet and I heard paper move.
“Somebody named Arlo,” she said. “For the foreman. Says here the foreman rotated off on the twelfth and the new one came on the seventeenth.”
Then I sat there with the phone in my lap. Shawna Pell is my ex-husband’s new wife.
She has been for two years. She owns two welding rigs and a bank note on both of them.
I own one rig, one stinger, a good set of grinders, and a welder number. That number is the whole of what I have in this work.
It took sixteen years to make it worth anything, and somebody had just signed it away on a ticket.
I called her. I only called her once, and I want that on the record, because people have since asked me why I did not call ten times, or call a lawyer, or drive to Watford City and raise Cain at the front desk.
She picked up on the second ring. I could hear a television and a dog.
“Raina,” she said, flat, like she had been waiting for it all afternoon and had already decided how it would go.
“You know whose welds those are,” I said. “Twenty-two tie-ins on the north end of that spread. You know Arlo was on the mainline running fill passes the whole nine days. Fix the invoice and it ends right there. I won’t say another word to anybody.”
She did not yell. She did not call me names. That was the cold part, how calm she was about it, like the two of us were talking over a feed bill.
“The contractor calls you for every hard tie-in, Raina,” she said. “Every single one. My rigs sat in the yard three weeks this summer. I’ve got two notes and a hand to pay. Somebody in this family has to get some of that work.”
“I’m not in your family,” I said. “And they’re my welds.”
“They were on the north end of a spread my hand was working,” she said. “The tickets are signed. It’s done.”
Then she said she had supper on, and she hung up, and I sat in the truck until the sun moved off the windshield.
I believe her about the payments. I have had payments. I know what it feels like when a rig sits in the yard and the note comes due anyway.
I still do not believe a payment makes another woman’s work yours.