The Five Thousand a Month I Never Saw

He pulled it open the rest of the way. He read every one. Rent. Electric. The Buick. Church. Then he picked up the one that said Tyler and turned it over, and on the back, in pencil, was my figuring for the fishing reel I had given the boy that afternoon. Forty-two dollars and some cents, saved up at five dollars a week since the end of October, each five crossed off as I put it in.

Tyler had opened it between a new bicycle and a telephone that cost more than my rent.

My son sat down on my kitchen floor.

He did not exactly decide to. His knees went, and he slid down the front of the cabinets in his wool coat and sat there on the linoleum with that envelope in his two hands, and he put his forehead down on his knees.

I had not seen him cry since he was fourteen. I had forgotten that he does it without any sound at all, the same as his daddy.

I pulled a chair over and I sat down by him and I put my hand on the back of his neck. Down under the floor the last dryer was still turning, thumping a little, somebody’s tennis shoes going around.

“She told me you were drowning,” I said, after a while.

He lifted his head.

“At your father’s funeral lunch. In the church kitchen. She took me by the elbow and said the business was in terrible trouble, that you’d never admit it, and that the kindest thing I could do was never ask you for one thing.”

“Mom, the business has never been in trouble. Not one quarter. We put on eleven crews since Dad died.”

“I know that now.”

“That was the same month,” he said. He was looking at the wall. “The same month. I came home from the funeral and I told her, I want to send Mom five thousand a month, I don’t want her worrying about one thing, ever. And she said that was beautiful. She said, let me set it up, you’ve got enough on you. And about a week after, she said she’d talked to you, and you’d cried, and you’d asked that we never speak of it because it shamed you to take it.”

“I never had any such talk.”

“I know that now.”

So there it was, laid out on the linoleum between us. One lie told to the mother and one told to the son, and the two of them fitted together so neatly that neither of us ever had a reason to open our mouths. All she had needed, for three years, was for both of us to go on loving each other politely.

“It was a good plan,” I said. “I’ll give her that.”

“Don’t. Don’t be fair to her right now, I can’t stand it.”

“All right.”

He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He looked around my room again, slowly, at every single thing in it.

“I drove to Dallas eleven times this year,” he said. “Eleven. I drove to Wichita for a bid I knew we wouldn’t get. I drove two hours to look at a boat.” He shook his head. “Forty minutes, Mom. In almost four years I never once came to see where you lived.”

“I always came to you. It made more sense, with the room you’ve got.”

“That’s what she said. Every time. It’s easier if Sandy comes here.” He pressed the envelope flat against his knee. “But she didn’t make me stay home. I want to put this all on her, and most of it goes there. Not that part. Nobody stopped me from getting in the truck. I just let it be easy.”