The Bank Card He Called Severance

Roy comes back

He came to the little house I bought on Sycamore Street on a Sunday afternoon in the fall. I had bought it outright with Eleanor’s money, a two-bedroom with a real furnace and a front porch, and I was sitting on that porch shelling beans when his truck pulled up to the curb.

He had aged. Good. He came up the walk with his hat in his hands, and he tried the voice, the calm reasonable voice, the one that used to make me feel crazy for being upset.

“Nadine,” he said. “You look well. I heard about Mother’s account. I think you know that money was always meant to stay in the family. It came from the farm. My farm, my family’s farm. I’m not looking to take it all, I’m a reasonable man, but there has to be a fair split here, and I think you know that.”

I set the bowl of beans down in my lap. Five years earlier that voice would have folded me up small. It did not, that day.

“Roy,” I said, “your mother left me a letter.”

He stopped.

“She left me a letter,” I said, “and it is in a safe deposit box at First Farmers, and my lawyer has a copy, and Margaret Brennan has a copy, and it says in your mother’s own hand exactly why she left that money to me and exactly why she left you off of it. It says what she thought of the way you treated me. It names it. And she wrote at the bottom that you would come to my door someday with your hat in your hand and your reasonable voice, and that I was not to give you one thin dime. She knew you, Roy. Your own mother knew you better than I did, and she took thirty years getting ready for this exact afternoon.”

His face went through about four things. And then it went hard, the way it always did at the end, and he put his hat back on.

“You always did think you were owed something,” he said.

“I was,” I said. “I was owed thirty-seven years. Your mother just happened to be the only one in your family honest enough to pay it. Get off my porch, Roy.”

And he did. He got in his truck and he drove off, and I picked the bean bowl back up, and my hands were steady. That is the thing I noticed. My hands were steady.