The Thank You Cards That Told the Truth
The deck boards were still yellow. That is the first thing I remember, that raw butter color treated lumber has before a single summer has gotten to it. I could smell it from my sister’s driveway with the car windows up.
Cody saw the pool before I did. He was in the passenger seat, sitting the way he had to sit, straight as a fence post in the hard plastic brace he wore under his T-shirt eighteen hours a day.
“Aunt Rhonda got a pool?” he said.
“Can I swim in it before my surgery?”
I did not have an answer to that, so I told him to stay in the car and finish his fries, and I walked around back by myself.
Rhonda was on the deck with a long-handled skimmer, lifting cottonwood fluff off the water. It was the middle of May.
“Well, look who it is,” she said. She did not put the skimmer down.
“The hospital called me this morning,” I said. “The billing office at Children’s. They have not gotten a payment, Rhonda. Not a dime. They will hold his date twenty-one days, and then it goes to another child.”
“I told you I’d take care of it.”
“You told me you would deposit it that Monday and write them a check. That was close to three weeks ago.”
She dipped the skimmer and knocked it out over the rail. She is four years older than I am, and she has always done one more thing before she answers you, so you know whose time it is.
“It’s handled, Beth.”
“Then show me the deposit slip and I will get back in my car.”
That was when she set the skimmer against the rail and looked at me. She had the calm of somebody who had already practiced the conversation.
“I worked a month on that supper,” she said. “I made the flyers. I made forty phone calls. I stood on my feet nine hours that day. You think any of that was free? You think the meat was free?”
“The men’s group donated the meat.”
“Rhonda. Where is it?”
She glanced past me toward the driveway, toward my car with her nephew sitting in it, and she lowered her voice. Not out of shame. Out of good management.
“Who in this town is going to believe I took from my own nephew?” she said. “Listen to how that sounds. Go ahead and say it out loud to somebody, and listen to how it sounds coming out of your mouth.”
“I’ll get it to you when I get it to you. Don’t make this ugly.”
“I’m going to write my thank-you notes,” I said. “To everybody who signed the notebook. I am going to tell people the truth in them, whatever the truth is by then. If that money is at Children’s a week from today, it will be a happy truth. I would like that better than anything.”
“Write whatever you want,” my sister said, and picked the skimmer back up.
I should tell you how we got to that deck.
Cody was ten when the nurse doing his sports physical had him bend over and touch his toes, and then went quiet, and then went and got the doctor. One side of his back rode higher than the other.
Scoliosis. They put him in the brace, and for two years he wore it to school and to bed and to church, and took it off for his shower and one hour of baseball, and never once complained in my hearing.