For six years, my older brother took credit for getting me hired at the cheese plant and bragged about the $500 referral bonus he used to buy a smoker. At my 29th birthday dinner, I told Dad another factory had offered me a lead mechanic job paying $8 more an hour. Dad pointed his napkin at me and said, “Be grateful. Your brother’s the only reason the plant hired you.” Donnie looked me straight in the eye and nodded.

She’d made one label and stuck it on the statement. It said, “Long night.” I know that because Mij told me. I don’t know how Mij knew. Mij always knows. Amy didn’t leave him. She’s a better person than me. But she made him sell the smoker.

He listed it online for $400, a hundred less than he got for referring me. And Mij says a man from Colby picked it up in a horse trailer. About a week after the open house, there was a knock on my door. Sunday afternoon. I was renting a duplex on the west side of Marshfield then, watching the Brewers lose. It was my dad. He stood on my step with his hands in his pockets.

He looked older. He looked like a man who’d had to explain something at church. I let him in. He didn’t sit down. He stood in my kitchen and looked around like he’d never seen it, which was true. 6 years I’d lived there. He’d never once come over.

Then he said, “Your brother’s having a hard time.” I said, “I’ll bet. He’s unloading trucks at night for cash at his age. It’s honest work.” I said, he nodded. Then he said the thing he’d come to say, “You’re the supervisor now. You’ve got Ernie’s ear. Maybe you could put in a word. Get him back on.

Not for any line. I looked at my dad for a long time. Then I said he had somebody putting in a word for him for six years. Dad, every night, three times a night sometimes. It was me. I’m out of words. He opened his mouth and closed it.

He looked at the floor, then at the TV where the Brewers were still losing, then at me. I didn’t know, he said. I told you, I said at Thanksgiving 6 years ago. You laughed. He nodded once, the way Donnie had nodded at my birthday, except it meant something completely different. Then he let himself out. He didn’t apologize.

My dad doesn’t say sorry. He says things like, “Well,” and fixes your gutter without being asked. So, I didn’t wait by the phone. In October, Bruno Casper called me. Sam, he said, “Got a funny one. I’ve got an application on my desk for a line operator. Same last name as you.

Says he’s got 10 years at Mill Creek.” That’s my brother, I said. Figured. He didn’t list you as a reference. He listed some guy named Swede. I laughed so hard I had to sit down. Did you call Swede? I did.

He said, and I quote, “Hire the other one.” Bruno paused. “So, I’m asking you, off the record, anything I should know?” I thought about line four and the cheese and the cardboard box propping the guard open. I thought about my brother sitting in the quick trip in his work shirt. Part of me felt sorry for him. He’s my brother. But Bruno asked me a straight question and I don’t lie for people anymore.

So I gave him one sentence. Ask him who got who hired. Bruno was quiet for a second. Then he said, “That’s all I needed.” Donnie didn’t get the job. These days he works dayshift at a feed mill out by Spencer and they say he’s doing all right there. Mij says the feed mill doesn’t have a panel full of warning lights, just one big switch. That’s about his speed, she says.

Swede came by the plant at Christmas with something in the back of his pickup. His toolbox. His real one. The big red one with the drawers that stick and his initials scratched into the side with a nail. I’m done with it, he said. Don’t you ruin it. It’s in my office now.

I haven’t ruined it. In the spring, I bought a house, a little brick ranch on the east side of Marshfield with a two-car garage and a backyard big enough for a garden I keep promising to start. I bought it with my supervisor pay and 6 years of savings from never taking a vacation. I did take one in April, a week of fishing up near Minocqua.

Ernie made me send him a picture of a fish to prove I didn’t just stay home and mow my lawn. And then it was May again, my 30th birthday. This time I had it at my house. My crew and their families, Rosie and her husband Swede, Aunt Mij, Joe from Line 4, and Ernie who said he’d stay 15 minutes and stayed 4 hours. About 2 weeks before my mom called me, first time since the open house.