The Caviar In Her Grocery Cart

What happened to Wade

Wade did not go to prison. I want to be honest about that, because these stories always seem to end with somebody in handcuffs and real life is messier and slower.

He pled to a lower charge. He agreed to make restitution, which means for a long time to come a piece of every combine and every grain cart he sells goes to the bank and to me, and he lives with a felony record in a county where he has to look people in the eye at the co-op and the gas station and the church he used to say grace at. The dealership let him go quietly. He sells now for a smaller outfit an hour away, where fewer people know, though in a county like this “fewer” is a slippery word.

The last time I saw him in person was in the parking lot of the courthouse, after the property settlement. He came over to my truck, and he had that face on, the trustworthy one, the slow easy grin turned all the way down to sorry.

“Rachel,” he said. “I never meant for any of it to touch the house. That was Mom’s idea, the house. I told her it was the only thing I could, that the bank would go for. I was going to pay it all back before you ever knew.”

And there it was, the whole man in three sentences. It was his mother’s idea. He never meant for it to touch the house, except it was the house, it was always going to be the house, because the house was the only thing worth eighty thousand dollars and he knew it. And he was going to pay it back before I ever knew, which is a thief’s way of saying he was going to keep me from finding out.

“You forged my name, Wade,” I said. “You sat across from me at supper for fourteen months with my grandmother’s house borrowed out from under me, and you let your mother spend it on a swimming pool.”

He did not have anything to say to that. For once in his life, that easy face did not have a single thing to say.

I rolled up the window and I drove home.