The Four Words I Wrote Every Time
“I am not going to ask you whether it’s true,” she said. “That boy has not told me one thing yet that wasn’t. Does Scott know?”
“Scott is in Kansas under a welding hood. I am not handing him this on the telephone. I won’t do that to him, and I won’t do it to her.”
“I taught that young man to read,” she said. “He is going to read this sooner or later.” She glanced back at the school, where the grandpas were coming out in twos and threes, putting their caps back on. “And Carol Ann, there were twenty-two people in that room. I do not think it is going to be up to you.”
She was right. It took about twenty hours.
Don Halvorson’s son Jeff works on the same crew as Scott. The two of them rode down to Kansas together in March. Don is not a gossip. What he said to Jeff that night was this: “I was at the school today. Scott needs to call his mother. Not his wife. His mother.”
My phone rang Saturday at ten past noon.
“Mom.” He had driven into town to get a signal. I could hear his engine idling. “Jeff says his dad heard something at the school.”
“I expect he did.”
“Mom, he said Mason stood up and told the class you pay to come over. What does that mean, pay?”
“Scott, I am not going to tell you about your wife over the telephone.”
“Mom.”
“I mean it. I’m not. I’ll tell you one thing, and then you do what you think is right. You remember the pay app you put on my phone? The one account, you said. You and Tiff both.”
He was quiet.
“It’s all written down,” I said. “Every bit of it, with the dates. I wrote it down for you. You don’t have to take my word, or hers, or a seven-year-old’s.”
“I’m not opening that standing in a gravel lot,” he said finally. His voice had gone flat and careful, which is what his father’s used to do. “If it’s what I think it is, I want to be sitting down. I’ll call you back.”
He did not call me back.
At twenty to seven on Sunday morning, headlights came across my bedroom ceiling.
I had my robe on and the door open before he was out of the cab.
My son is thirty-six years old and six foot two, and he came up my walk like a man of sixty. He had driven all night. Fourteen hours, with two stops for diesel. His foreman, who has kids of his own, had told him, “Go. Be back Thursday.”
“You haven’t looked,” I said.
“No.” He held up his phone. “I haven’t. I want to look at my own table. And I want you sitting there, Mom.”
“Scott, that is between you and her.”
“You’re in it. Sounds like you bought your way in.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Get dressed. Please.”
I got dressed.
It was barely light when we came in their back door. The kitchen was dim and the coffee was already made, a full pot. Tiffany was sitting at the table in her robe with both hands around a mug she was not drinking from. She had heard the truck. I do not think she had slept either. She looked at Scott, and then at me, and she did not say a word about my shoes.
Nobody in that kitchen raised their voice. I want that understood.