The Bill They Mailed Me After Christmas

Dale married Connie in his thirties. Connie is not a bad woman the way a storm is not a bad thing. She is just weather. She decides what the family is doing and then the family does it, and if you are not useful to the doing she does not see you at all. For a long time I was useful. I was the one who could take Tyler for a week in the summer so they could go to the lake. I was the one who brought the funeral potatoes and stayed after to wash the roasters. I was the one who co-signed the truck.

That is the part that matters, so let me lay it out careful, because the whole thing turns on it and I have learned that people will believe the cruelty easy and doubt the paperwork.

Tyler is Dale and Connie’s boy, their only one, and he is twenty-six now. Four years back, right around when Harold got sick, Tyler needed a truck. Not wanted, needed, or that is how it got told to me. He had gone in with a fellow doing dirt work and hauling, grading driveways and cleaning out stock ponds and putting in culverts, the kind of work that eats trucks, and he needed a real one. A three-quarter-ton diesel, a Ford F-250 Power Stroke, dark blue, used but not old, with the long bed and the gooseneck hitch already in it. The kind of truck that costs like a small house because it is meant to work like a mule for fifteen years.

The credit union would not write the loan for Tyler alone. He was twenty-two, thin credit, a brand-new business with no books to show. Everybody in this county banks at Cornerstone, it is the only one that stayed local after the big banks bought up the rest, and the loan officer I sat with, a patient man named Roy Tibbetts who I have known since he was an usher at First Methodist, told Dale plain that the numbers did not work with just Tyler on the note. They needed a co-signer with a house free and clear and a long clean history. That was me. Harold was already too sick to be signing anything, and Dale, for reasons I did not understand then and understand too well now, did not want his own name on it. Connie said something about their debt-to-income being tied up in the new shop building. So they asked me.

I said yes the way I have said yes my whole life. Because he was family and because I could and because that is what you do. I want to be honest that I did not do it as some grand sacrifice. I did it the way you pass the potatoes. I signed where Roy showed me. And here is the thing that everybody forgot, and that I did not think much about myself for four years: at Cornerstone, when you co-sign a vehicle loan, they put you on the title too. It is how Roy does it, it is how they have always done it there, the co-signer goes on the title as a joint owner so the collateral is protected for the loan. I signed the note as co-borrower and my name went on the Kansas title right alongside Tyler’s, with the little “or” between us that I did not think about at the time and thought about a great deal later. Ruth A. Mercer OR Tyler J. Mercer. Both owners. Both borrowers. The credit union holding the lien.