The Application My Father In Law Kept
He stepped in. He looked at the pegboard, the oil pan, the kids’ sleds. He had never been in my garage. Eleven years, and he had never once seen where I kept my tools.
“You keep a clean shop,” he said.
“I try to.”
He took off his hat. He is not a man who takes off his hat. He held it by the brim and turned it a quarter turn, and another.
“I need to ask you for something,” he said, “and I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me get all the way through it.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m in trouble at the lot.” He said it to the snowblower. “I bought wrong last summer and I’ve been covering it ever since. I’ve got a count on the thirty-first. If I can’t put twelve thousand dollars against the old units by then, the finance company pulls my line and I’m closed. Forty-one years.”
He breathed.
“The bank won’t talk to me. I already borrowed on the building in September. Jean doesn’t know that. Josh doesn’t know how bad. I have gone down the list of every man I know, Dan, and I got to the bottom of it, and the only name left was the one I said couldn’t provide.”
His eyes came up then. They were wet, and he let me see it.
“I’m asking you for a loan. I’ve got no right to. I know what I said at that table and I know who heard me. If you tell me to get in my car, I’ll get in it, and I won’t hold it against you.”
I set the file down.
I will be honest about what went through me. There was a moment, about as long as it takes to breathe in, when I could have enjoyed it. The whole eleven years was standing in my garage with its hat off. I could feel the shape of the sentence I could say.
Then I thought about Mrs. Petersen saying you only have to last two streets. I thought about what it is to be on the floor and hear somebody coming.
“I can’t answer you out here,” I said.
His face fell.
“Not because the answer’s no. Because it’s not my money, it’s ours. Kelly’s in the kitchen. If you want to ask me, you ask us. That’s the only way I do it.”
He looked at the door to the house like it was a long way off.
“She’s my daughter,” he said. “You want me to say that in front of my daughter.”
“I want her to hear it from you instead of from me. I don’t keep things from her, Walt. I’d be telling her in ten minutes either way.”
He put his hat back on, and took it off again, and nodded.
Kelly had the checkbook out before he finished. I saw her reach into the drawer for it about halfway through, and I put my hand on hers, and she waited.
Walt said all of it again at our kitchen table, in the chair where Ben does his spelling. It was harder for him the second time. I think that is as it should be.
When he was done, Kelly looked at me, and I looked at her, and that was the whole meeting. We have twelve thousand dollars. It took us six years to have it. It was going to be a roof.