The Seat They Gave Away

And they did not know, because I had gone to real trouble to make sure they never found out, that I had been quietly holding the whole family up for years.

Start with the cabin. My grandfather built a cabin on Cedar Lake in 1961, one bedroom and a sleeping porch and a dock that needs a new board every spring. It is the one place my family has ever been happy all at the same time. Every Fourth of July, every Labor Day, forty years of my mother’s photographs, all of it happens at that cabin. Three years ago, my father sat me down, embarrassed, and told me he had fallen behind on the note and the property taxes both, that the bad winter had eaten the savings, and that Gordon Vance down at First Cedar Bank was talking about the word foreclosure. My father is a proud man. It cost him something to say it. And what he asked me for was a loan of a few hundred dollars to buy some time.

I did not loan him a few hundred dollars. I drove to First Cedar Bank the next morning, and I sat down across from Gordon Vance, who has known my family since before I was born, and I paid off the entire note on the cabin, and I paid the three years of back taxes, and I put the current taxes on an automatic draft out of my business account. And then I asked Gordon to do me one favor. I asked him not to tell my father any of it. Let him think the bank worked out a payment plan. Let him keep his pride.

Gordon looked at me for a long moment across his desk and said, “Son, that’s a lot of money to spend on staying invisible.”

I told him I was used to it.

Then there was my father’s heart. Two years ago Frank had a widowmaker, ninety-nine percent blockage, and they choppered him to the cardiac center in the city and put in two stents, and he lived. What my father believes to this day is that Medicare and his supplement covered all of it. What actually happened is that the supplement had lapsed because he had let it go to save forty dollars a month, and the bill that came was the kind of number that ends marriages and takes houses. My mother cried at the kitchen table. And I called the hospital foundation and the billing office and I wrote the check, and I told my parents the hospital had a program for veterans, which my father is, technically, from two years in the Army in the seventies, and he was so relieved and so proud of his service having finally paid off that he told the story at church for a month. I let him. It was worth every dollar to watch him tell it.