The Money My Father Left Me

The chair beside me

The first toast had barely finished when my mother slid into the folding chair beside me, smelling of the rose lotion she has worn my whole life and the sweet white wine somebody had poured too generously. Her charm bracelet was cold when it grazed my wrist under the paper tablecloth. She squeezed my forearm the way she used to squeeze it in church when I was small and wiggling, a squeeze that said sit still and behave.

We were in the American Legion hall on Third Street, Post 214, the one with the folding tables and the coffee urn that has been percolating since before I was born. The whole room smelled like scalloped potatoes and burnt drip coffee and the lemon oil the ladies auxiliary uses on the wood paneling. String lights ran along the top of the trophy case. Somebody had taped a hand-lettered banner over the flag that read CONGRATULATIONS DANA AND WADE, and one corner had already come loose and was drooping toward the sheet cake.

Through the propped-open side door I could see the flagpole out front, and the flag catching the last orange stripe of a July evening, the kind of light that makes even a gravel parking lot look like something worth remembering. I had been happy an hour before. That is the part I keep coming back to. I had been standing next to Wade with his hand warm on the small of my back, and I had thought, for the first time in a long time, that maybe I had made it out. Maybe the hard years were behind me.

Then my mother sat down beside me and put her mouth close to my ear.

“Dana,” she said, low enough to slide right under the music coming out of the little speaker on the bar, “we need to talk about the money.”

My stomach dropped the way it does when your truck hits a dip in a county road too fast. I did not have to ask which money. There has only ever been one money in my family, and it is not really money at all. It is my father.

The money that is not money

Let me tell you what the sixty thousand dollars is, so you understand why what happened at that supper was not about dollars.

When I was nineteen, my dad, Dale, was killed on a Tuesday morning in October. He was driving the grain truck out to the co-op elevator, the same run he had made a thousand times, and a kid in a dually ran the stop sign at the crossroads by the Lutheran cemetery and hit him broadside. Dad lived four days in the county hospital and then he did not. I was in my second year at the community college over in the next town, studying to be a dental hygienist, and I came home and I never really left again.

The settlement came almost two years later, after a lawyer in a strip mall handled the whole thing and took his cut and shook my hand and told me my father was a good man, which he was, and which I did not need a stranger to tell me. Sixty thousand dollars. That was what my father’s life came out to on the paperwork, after the medical bills and the fees, and I know that is not what a life is worth, and everybody who has lost somebody this way knows it too. It is just the number the world hands you so it can close the file.