Free The Best American Short Stories 2015 by T.C. Boyle Page A

Review
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    A LL HIS LIFE McHenry had lived with someone watching him: a mother, a father, a wife, a daughter, his customers. He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich. They didn’t make a show of watching him but they did.
Assholes and elbows:
a thing he learned in high school, doing pick-and-shovel work on an extra gang for the Milwaukee Railroad. It didn’t matter how much you got done or how many mistakes you made or how smart you were. The only thing was to look like you were working when Sorenson, the straw boss, came by.
I just want to see assholes and elbows
.
    So he learned to look like he was working when he worked. He learned to act like a father when his daughter was around, to look like a husband when Marnie needed a husband. He did what people expected him to or maybe a little more. He always tried for more. McHenry had a brisk practical manner, plastic glasses, and a crewcut that turned gray early, an all-purpose character that didn’t change. He got along with people. It was a way through.
    He wasn’t expecting to find himself with nobody watching, but here he was, age fifty-nine. Marnie had gone five years before, a pancreatic cancer that burned so swiftly through her that McHenry never felt it until she was buried. Still sometimes it felt to him that the death had never happened, an unreal, ugly dream. Then Carolyn, their daughter, had ended up in Guangzhou, China. This too felt unlikely. She had gone off to Missoula and ended up as a dual major in Chinese and business and now she was importing Chinese balers and hay rakes and making crazy money. They Skyped each other every few weeks but it was nothing like having her around, just a picture on a computer screen. McHenry talked about how busy he was and how things were going fine and so on. He was still her father, even if she was on the other side of the world. Plus the time was impossible for him to figure out. He would call her on Sunday afternoon and it would be Monday morning where she was.
    McHenry approved on principle. If you were going to get the hell out of Harlow, you might as well just keep going. And he liked the fact that she was good with money. He felt like he had given her that.
    Still it was just him and Missy, the little papillon dog that Marnie had gotten just before they found out. It seemed like a dirty trick. Claws skittering on the wood floors.
    And then these two kids down out of Billings talked one of their dads into bankrolling a brand-new computer-controlled Japanese drilling rig. McHenry did the math. They were losing money every time they took a job from him. They had to be. But he couldn’t underbid them, despite the fact that his rig was paid for. McHenry knew better than to expect his customers to turn down a low bid. These were men who would drive ninety miles to the Sam’s Club to save a nickel on toilet paper.
    McHenry could have waited them out. But one afternoon, when he got off the phone with Gib Gustafson, a wheat farmer McHenry had known since kindergarten, a millionaire, telling him that they weren’t going to be able to do business—after he got that call, McHenry just got angry. If Marnie had been there, if Carolyn. But they weren’t. By five that afternoon he was out of the business, rig sold, trucks sold, FOR RENT sign on the shop.
    Was this a mistake? Maybe. He had all the money he was going to need, from savings along the way and from Marnie’s life insurance. The house was paid for and so was the shop. Even if nobody rented it, and nobody was able to stay in business in Harlow anymore, it was still worth five or six times what he had paid for it, the year after the railroad left town. He had a couple of rentals, and no crew, by then, that was depending on him.
    But the quiet.
    The phone just didn’t ring.
    And if he didn’t get laid pretty soon he